She was dumb. She stared incredulously at his heavy, sincere, embarrassed face, as if it were something abnormal, almost supernatural, a hallucination.
"Meaning" he faltered, "I mean to say--of course--I love you, Sar--er--ah--Miss Manwaring--and I think I can make you happy--"
He was making heavy weather of his simple declaration, labouring like an old-fashioned square-rigger in a beam sea.
"If you'll marry me, that is," he concluded in a breath, with obvious relief if with a countenance oddly shadowed in the staring moonlight by the heat of his distress.
She tried, she meant to give him his answer without delay; it were kinder. But she found it impossible; the negative stuck stubbornly in her throat. She knew it would stab him deep. He wasn't the man to take love lightly; his emotions were anything but on the surface; their wounds would be slow to heal.
And in spite of the positive animus she had all along entertained toward him, she didn't want to hurt him now; perhaps not strangely, remembering that this proposal of marriage was a direct, down-right protestation of implicit faith in her, uttered squarely on top of a most damnable indictment--remembering, too, that it was barely two hours since Sally herself had been ready, almost eager, to believe him capable of committing the very crime of implication in which he exonerated her without an instant's hesitation.
True, she had been quick to exonerate him in her thoughts as soon as the suspicion was engendered in them, but she had done so almost reluctantly, ungenerously, not because she wanted to believe him innocent, but because the burden of the evidence, together with the counsel of instinct, had been too strong in his favour to permit more than a moment's doubt. And she had repented; but that, it appeared, was not enough; she must be punished in this unique way, have her own unworthiness demonstrated by this artless manifestation of his worth. And however much she might long to make amends to him, she couldn't.
The pain and the pity of it! He was a far better man than she a woman, and he honoured her with his love--and she couldn't requite him, she couldn't love him; he was still too far from the mirage of her ideal.
"Oh!" she sighed. "Why?"
He misconstrued. "I've told you heaps of times--because you're a woman, not a manikin. Marriage would mean something more to you than clothes, Europe, idleness, and flirting with other women's husbands, just as it would have to mean more to me than hiring a woman to live with me and entertain my friends."