“There you are wrong. He is my kind. He is what I like, and he is what I want to be like.”
A wave of red dyed her face, and, in a tone more passionate than she had ever used to her lover, she said to Ruggles:
“I love him—I love him!” Her words sent something like a sword through the older man’s heart. He said gently: “Don’t say it. He don’t know what love means yet.”
He wanted to tell her that the girl Dan married should be the kind of woman his mother was, but Ruggles couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Now, as he sat near her, he was growing so complex that his brain was turning round. He heard her murmur:
“I told you I knew your act, Mr. Ruggles. It isn’t any use.”
This brought him back to his position and once more he leaned toward her and, in a different tone from the one he had intended to use, murmured:
“You don’t know. You haven’t any idea. I do ask you to let Dan go, that’s a fact. I have got something else to propose in its place. It ain’t quite the same, but it is clear—marry me!”
She gave a little exclamation. A slight smile rippled over her face like the sunset across a pale pool at dawn.
“Laugh,” he said humbly; “don’t keep in. I know I am old-fashioned as the deuce, and me and Dan is quite a contrast, but I mean just what I say, my dear.”
She controlled her amusement, if it was that. It almost made her cry with mirth, and she couldn’t help it. Between laughing breaths she said to him: