"I know," Roger answered quietly, "that's the way one feels here. The place is bewitched, I think. Well, Tip, I want to get married, and I'd rather you'd be the one to do the business than any man I know."
"I rather suspected it," Tip said, "and I'll be mighty glad to do it for you, Roger. Who is she?"
There was quite a pause here, and Roger puffed slowly and thoughtfully at the old pipe and looked out of the open door toward the little bay. By and by he spoke, and the concise clearness of what he said was most characteristic of him.
"Of course I needn't go into all this at all," he began, "unless I wanted to. In fact, my original idea was to have a perfect stranger (as I somehow thought Jerry would bring) marry us without his being any the wiser. But the minute I saw you, Tip, I felt that I'd like you to know. But I'd rather you kept it to yourself."
He paused a moment, and Tip nodded gravely.
"Of course you have my word for that," he said.
"The woman I'm going to marry," Roger went on, in his quiet, practical voice, "was born and brought up on this little peninsula. She has never left it but once in her life. Her mother died when she was a baby, her father a few weeks ago, I should say. She does not know her father's name, nor, consequently, her own. It is evident from this house, the furnishings and the books, that he was a gentleman and an educated one. For as long as she can remember they were served and looked after in every way by a woman called Hester Prynne and this half-witted fellow called Caliban. Of course I have no idea what their real names were. The woman died very recently and the girl was left alone. There was a big chest fairly well filled with money under her father's bed, but not a line or word in it to give any clue. Either her father or mother must have been Italian, I should think, both from her name and her general type, but she knows no Italian whatever—only a simple childish sort of French. She is the only woman I should ever marry if I lived a hundred years, and I want you to do it to-day. Will you?"
I drew the long breath I had been holding during this speech and felt a great relief. It was all so simple, after all! I hoped Tip wouldn't spoil it, but I was afraid he would. He wasn't at all what one would call a man of the world: he had always felt a terrible responsibility for other people's actions, and this particular action was, to put it mildly, certainly rather unusual. But I had under-estimated both Tip's keenness and the effect of Roger's big, quiet personality. For Tip stared hard at his pipe a moment, then at Roger, then back at the pipe, and said:
"Surely I will, Roger. And be glad to." And there's Tip Elder for you!
We smoked awhile longer in silence. Finally Tip began again in a casual sort of way, as if, the main question having been settled, this were a mere detail, but one that he might as well mention.