"Well, don't marry her."
"Does it occur to you," I asked, with some bitterness, "that there are some things a person can do, and some things he can't do? If the head of my Department orders me to Nyngan, I can reply by letter, telling him to mind his own business, and not concern himself about me; but if Mrs. Beaudesart assumes—if she merely takes for granted—that I'm going to marry her, I must do it, to keep her in countenance. How, in the fiend's name, can I slink out of it, now that I'm accepted? Can I tell her I've examined my heart, and I find I can only love her as a sister? Now, would n't that sound well? No, no; I'm a done man. Of course, she had no business to accept me unawares; but as she has done so, I must help her to keep up the grisly fraud of feminine reluctance; for, as the abbot sings, so must the sacristan respond. It is kismet. This is how all these unaccountable marriages are brought about; though, to be sure, I have the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the enterprise brings me a good many days' march nearer home."
The expression of heavenly beatitude on Moriarty's face goaded my mind to activity. Sweeping, with one glance, the whole horizon of expediency and possibility, I caught sight of the idea glanced at in a former page, and suggested, you will remember, by my dialogue with Ida.
"By the way, Moriarty," said I; "respecting that trifling debt of honour— there's another condition that I didn't think of. As a sort of payment on account, you must privately and insidiously circulate a very grave scandal for me."
"Well, I won't!" exclaimed the young fellow, after a moment's pause.
"I don't mind telling a lie when I'm driven to it; but a woman's a woman.
Do your own dirty work!"
"Then, by Jove, I'll post you!"
If anyone had used this threat to me, I would have asked how the posting was usually done, and what results might be expected to follow; but Moriarty's lip quivered under the threat.
"Do your worst," said he, swallowing the lump in his throat.
"You may depend on that," I replied quietly. "However, the scandal was only about myself."
"I don't understand."