He laughed again in the same strained fashion and forced her hand to remain in his.
“Look here. You don’t suppose I am going to let you go like this, now that I have seen you again. You don’t suppose I am going to give you up to that infamous scoundrel? You have got to marry me.”
Bringing all her strength of character to bear, she exclaimed: “I expect you think you are the only person who has asked me to marry him, Dan. I am going to marry Prince Poniotowsky. He is perfectly crazy about me.”
Until that moment she had not made him think that she was indifferent to him, and the idea that such a thing was possible, was too much for his overstrained heart to bear. Dan cried her name in a voice whose appeal was like a hurt creature’s, and as the hurt creature in its suffering sometimes springs upon its torturer, he flung his arms around her as she sat in the motor, held her and kissed her, then set her free, and as the motor flew along, tore open the door to spring out or to throw himself out, but clinging to him she prevented his mad act. She stopped the car along the edge of the quiet, wooded allée. Blair saw that he had terrified her. She covered her beating heart with her hands and gasped at him that he was “crazy, crazy,” and perhaps a little late his dignity and self-possession returned.
“I am mad,” he acknowledged more calmly, “and I am sorry that I frightened you. But you drive me mad.”
Without further word he got out and left her agitated, leaning toward him, and Blair, less pale and thoroughly the man, lifted his hat to her and, with unusual grace, bowed good night and good-by. Then, rushing as he had come, he walked off down through the allée, his gray figure in his gray clothes disappearing through the vista of meeting trees.
For a moment she stared after him, her eyes fastened on the tall slender beautiful young man. Blair’s fire and ardor, his fresh youthfulness, his protection and his chivalry, his ardent devotion, touched her profoundly. Tears fell, and one splashed on her white glove. Was he really going to ruin his life? The old ballad, The Earl of Moray, ran through her head:
“And long may his lady look from the castle wall.”
Dan had neither title nor, according to Ruggles, had he any money, and she could marry the prince; but Dan, as he walked so fast away, misery snapping at his heels as he went, stamping through the woods, seemed glorious to Letty Lane and the only one she wanted in the world. What if anything should happen to him really? What if he should really start out to do the town according to the fashion of his Anglo-Saxon brothers, but more desperately still? She took a card from the case in the corner of the car, scribbled a few words, told the man to drive around the curve and meet the outlet of the path by which Dan had gone. When she saw him within reaching distance she sent the chauffeur across the woods to give Mr. Blair her scribbled word and consoled herself with the belief that Dan wouldn’t “go to the dogs or throw himself in the river until he had seen her again.”