She, rising likewise, confronted him in all her fresh and youthful beauty, fair and smiling, her bosom heaving and her eyes dilating with eagerness.
"I would,—indeed I would!" she averred delightedly. "I would rather marry you than any man in the world!"
There was a moment's silence. Then—
"Why?" he asked.
The simple monosyllabic query completely confused her. It was unexpected, and she was at her wit's end how to reply to it. Moreover, he kept his eyes so pertinaciously fixed upon her that she felt her blood rising to her cheeks and brow in a hot flush of—shame? Oh no!—not shame, but merely petulant vexation. The proper way for him to behave at this juncture, so she reflected, would be that he should take her tenderly in his arms and murmur, after the penny-dreadful style of elderly hero, "My darling, my darling! Can you, so young and beautiful, really care for an old fogey like me?'" to which she would, of course, have replied in the same fashion, and with the most charming insincerity—"Dearest! Do not talk of age! You will never be old to my fond heart!" But to stand, as he was standing, like a rigid figure of bronze, with a hard pale face in which only the eyes seemed living, and to merely ask "Why" she would rather marry him than any other man in the world, was absurd, to say the least of it, and indeed quite lacking in all delicacy of sentiment. She sought about in her mind for some way out of the difficulty and could find none. She grew more and more painfully crimson, and wished she could cry. A well worked-up passion of tears would have come in very usefully just then, but somehow she could not turn the passion on. And a horrid sense of incompetency and failure began to steal over her—an awful foreboding of defeat. What could she do to seize the slippery opportunity and grasp the doubtful prize? How could she land the big golden fish which she foolishly fancied she had at the end of her line? Never had she felt so helpless or so angry.
"Why?" he repeated—"Why would you marry me? Not for love certainly. Even if you believed in love—which you say you do not,—you could not at your age love a man at mine. That would be impossible and unnatural. I am old enough to be your grandfather. Think again, Lucy! Perhaps you spoke hastily—- out of girlish thoughtlessness—or out of kindness and a wish to please me,—but do not, in so serious a matter, consider me at all. Consider yourself. Consider your own nature and temperament—your own life—your own future—your own happiness. Would you, young as you are, with all the world before you—would you, if I asked you, deliberately and of your own free will, marry me?"
She drew a sharp breath, and hurriedly wondered what was best to do. He spoke so strangely!—he looked so oddly! But that might be because he was in love with her! Her lips parted,—she faced him straightly, lifting her head with a little air of something like defiance.
"I would!—of course I would!" she replied. "Nothing could make me happier!"
He gave a kind of gesture with his hands as though he threw aside some cherished object.
"So vanishes my last illusion!" he said. "Well! Let it go!"