"I have come here to tell you—to ask you——" He stopped, then went on abruptly, "This morning, at Maidenhead, I asked your daughter to marry me."
"What, already?" said Sir William involuntarily. "That was very prompt. And what did she say?"
"She said it was impossible," Rendel answered, encouraged more by Gore's manner and his general reception of the news than by his actual words.
"Impossible, did she say?" said Sir William. "And what did you say to that?"
"That I should come here this afternoon," Rendel replied.
Sir William smiled.
"That was prompter still," he said. "It looks as if you knew your own mind at any rate."
"I do indeed, if ever a man did," said Rendel confidently. "And I really do believe that it was because she was a good daughter she said it was impossible."
"Well, if it was, that's the kind that often makes an uncommonly good wife," Sir William said.
"I don't doubt it," Rendel said, with conviction. "And I feel that if only you and Lady Gore——"