‘Yet awhile,’ echoed Sampson; ‘I’m three-and-thirty. If I don’t take the business in hand now, Miss Clare, it will be too late. I am thinking of matrimony, and have been thinking of it very constantly for the last six months. But there is only one girl in the world that I would care to marry, and if she won’t have me I shall go down to my grave a bachelor.’
‘Don’t say that,’ cried Celia. ‘That is deciding things much too hastily. You haven’t seen all the girls in the world. How can you know anything about it? Hazlehurst is such a narrow sphere. A man might as well live in a nutshell, and call that life. You ought to travel. You ought to see the world of fashion. There are charming boarding-houses at Brighton, now, where you would meet very stylish girls. Why don’t you try Brighton?’
‘I don’t want to try Brighton, or anywhere else,’ exclaimed Mr. Sampson, with a wounded air. ‘I tell you I am fixed, fixed as fate. There is only one girl in this magnificent universe I want for my wife. Celia, you must feel it, you must know it—you are that girl.’
‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ cried Celia. ‘This is quite too dreadful.’
‘It is not dreadful at all. Don’t be carried away by the first shock of the thing. I may have been too sudden, perhaps. Oh, Celia, I have worshipped too long in silence, and I may, perchance’—Mr. Sampson rather dwelt on the perchance, which seemed to him a word of peculiar appropriateness, almost a lapse into poetry—‘I may, perchance, have been too sudden in my avowal. But when a man is as much in earnest as I am, he does not study details. Celia, you must not say no.’
‘But I do say no,’ protested Celia.
‘Not an irrevocable no?’
‘Yes, a most irrevocable no. I am very much flattered, of course, and I really like you very much—as we all do—because you are good and true and honest. But I never, never, never could think of you in any other character than that of a trustworthy friend.’
‘Do you really mean it?’ asked poor Sampson, aghast.
He was altogether crushed by this unexpected blow. That any young lady in Hazlehurst could refuse the honour of an alliance with him had never occurred to him as within the range of possibility. He had taken plenty of time in making up his mind upon the matrimonial question. He had been careful and deliberate, and had waited till he was thoroughly convinced that Celia Clare was precisely the kind of wife he wanted, before committing himself by a serious declaration. He had been careful that his polite attentions should not be too significant, until the final die was cast. His journey to Brittany had given him ample leisure for reflection. Prostrate in his comfortable berth on board the St. Malo steamer, in the dim light of the cabin lamp, lulled by the monotonous oscillation of the steamer, he had been able to contemplate the question of marriage from every standpoint, and this offer of to-night was the result of those meditations.