"There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a little.
"I broke my engagement to you," she admitted, "broke it to come here with—the others. I haven't any excuse to offer you."
"And when," Peter demanded of her, "have I asked any other excuse of you for anything that you chose to do except that you chose it. There was something I wished to say to you, that I hoped for a more auspicious occasion...." He hurried on with it suddenly as a thing to be got over with at all hazards. "It was to say that I hoped you might not find it utterly beyond you to think of marrying me." He saw her sway a little, holding still to her chair, and moved toward her a step, dizzy himself with the sudden onset of emotion. "But now that it is said, if it distresses you we will say no more about it." She waved him back for a moment without altering her strained, trapped attitude.
"Have you said this to mamma? And has she—has she said anything to you? About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"
"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet in so far as that was concerned." He waited for her answer to that, and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped——" She stopped him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.
"That—one may take for granted, may one not? Since you have asked me, that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"
"Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."
"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as something concrete, graspable.
"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could take everything for granted, everything."
"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect anything—any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"