"Why, because I had made up my mind to marry you!" he said. "You told me that this old place was a sort of dreamland of yours—and I didn't want to complicate matters. I wanted your love for me to be a reality."
"Well, it—it is!" I confessed.
After a long while—that is, the sun-dial said it was a long while—spent this way a sudden thought of my waiting hosts at Bannerley came over me. I sprang up from the step of the pedestal where we had been sitting.
"I must get some word to Mrs. Montgomery!" I said. "They will be thinking that my rash American ways have got me into some dreadful scrape, I'm afraid."
But the serene man at my side was still serene. His face looked as if nothing on earth could ever cause him a pang again. He caught my hand and drew me gently, but rather steadfastly back to my place.
"Mrs. Montgomery knows everything—except that we are going to be married—when did you say, to-morrow?" he smiled. "I've been staying with them, and they told me about you, and I told them about you—and we had rather a satisfactory adjustment of neighborly relations."
I looked at him in awe. I could not quite shake off the idea that he had a miraculous lamp hidden about somewhere in his pockets. Things seemed to happen when he wished them to happen.
"Did you chance to know that I would take a bad train and be delayed here this morning at sunrise?" I asked, trying to look dignified and unawed. "Did you know that I should be compelled to waste precious morning hours pacing up and down a railway station platform?"
"Why, of course," he answered imperturbably. "Mrs. Montgomery sent me over to meet you."
I sprang up again, more energetically this time.