"Yes, I dare say," said old David absently. He looked up sharply. "Young Hartley doesn't come here as much as he used to do."
"No," said Miss Benham, "he doesn't." She gave a little laugh.
"To avoid cross-examination," she said, "I may as well admit that he asked me to marry him and I had to refuse. I'm sorry, because I like him very much indeed."
Old David made an inarticulate sound which may have been meant to express surprise—or almost anything else. He had not a great range of expression.
"I don't want," said he, "to seem to have gone daft on the subject of marriage, and I see no reason why you should be in any haste about it—certainly, I should hate to lose you, my child, but—Hartley, as the next Lord Risdale, is undoubtedly a good match. And you say you like him." The girl looked up with a sort of defiance, and her face was a little flushed.
"I don't love him," she said. "I like him immensely but I don't love him, and after all—well, you say I'm cold and I admit I'm more or less ambitious, but, after all—well, I just don't quite love him. I want to love the man I marry."
Old David Stewart held up his black cigar and gazed thoughtfully at the smoke which streamed thin and blue and veil-like from its lighted end.
"Love!" he said in a reflective tone. "Love." He repeated the word two or three times slowly, and he stirred a little in his bed.
"I have forgotten what it is," said he. "I expect I must be very old. I have forgotten what love—that sort of love—is like. It seems very far away to me and rather unimportant. But I remember that I thought it important enough once, a century or two ago. Do you know, it strikes me as rather odd that I have forgotten what love is like. It strikes me as rather pathetic." He gave a sort of uncouth grimace and stuck the black cigar once more into his mouth.
"Egad!" said he, mumbling indistinctly over the cigar, "how foolish love seems when you look back at it across fifty or sixty years!"