“I can refuse you nothing. But I need not write, for I think it very likely that now the sale of Kaburie is 'off' with Mr Gerrard, she will come back there to live. I had a telegram from her yesterday, in which she said that she might come back next month.”
“Then, Mr Knowles, you will have to propose to her—that will be ever so much better than asking her for a bigger salary,” and Kate laughed.
The ex-sailor blushed like a girl, then he tugged furiously at his moustache. “By Jove, Miss Fraser, I—I—you don't know—I—if I were not so old, and not so beastly poor—I was going to ask you to marry me. There, it's out now, and you'll think me an ass.”
Kate's manner changed. What she had feared he would one day say, he had now said, and she felt sorry for him.
“I think that you are such a man that any woman should be proud to hear what you have said to me, Mr Knowles,” she said softly. “I know more about you than you think I do. But I shall never marry. I am going to stick to my father, and grow up into a nice old maid with fluffy white hair.”
“You are not offended with me?”
“Offended! No, indeed. I feel proud that you should think so much of me as to have thought of asking me to be your wife,” and she put out her hand to him. He raised it quickly to his lips, and then saying something incoherent about his wanting to see Cockney Smith's kangaroo pups, hurriedly left the room.
“That was over soon,” breathed Kate, as she watched his well-set little figure striding across the paddock to Smith's humpy. “He is a gentleman, if ever there was one in the world.”
“What is the matter, little one?” asked her father, as he entered the room.
“Nothing, dad. I was only looking at Mr Knowles going over to Smith's humpy to look at the new kangaroo pups.”