“Is this Mr. Challoner deeply in love with her, too?” asked the mother of the four unwedded girls, trying to veil the eagerness in her voice behind a mass of carelessness.
“Hopelessly,” returned her informant, “and for that reason I marvel that he is not on hand to sue for every dance and challenge any one to mortal combat who dares seek the beauty’s favor.”
Meanwhile, the young girl who had been the subject of the above gossip had disappeared through one of the long French windows that opened out upon the piazza, and, leaning upon the arm of her companion, had floated across the white sands to the water’s edge.
For a moment they stood thus, in utter silence, while the tide rippled in slowly at their feet, mirroring the thousands of glittering stars in the blue dome above on its pulsing bosom.
Queenie pretends the utmost innocence in regard to the object he has in view in asking her to come down to the water by whose waves they have spent so many happy hours, to say good-by.
A score or more of lovers have stood on the self-same spot with her in the last fortnight, and ere they had turned away from those rippling waves they had laid their hearts and fortunes at her dainty feet, only to be rejected, as only a coquette can reject a suitor.
Yes, she knew what was coming; his troubled face and agitation was a forerunner of that, but her tongue ran on volubly and gayly, of how she had enjoyed Newport, and how sorry she would feel as the train bore her away to her city home.
And as she talked on in her delightful, breezy way, his face grew graver and more troubled.
“He is going to ask me to marry him, and it depends upon his fortune as to whether I say yes or no. He has been wonderfully silent as to what he is, but if I am good at guessing, I should say that he is a Western silver king—he must be worth twice as many millions as Ray Challoner,” Queenie said to herself.
She had adroitly led up to a proposal of marriage by knowing just what to say, and how to use her subtly sweet voice in uttering the sentiments low and falteringly, to arouse him to a declaration of the tender passion.