Toni replied I was quite wrong. In his opinion these two eyes harmonized admirably; they reminded him, he said, of bright dawn and starry night. Indeed, properly speaking, he alone would be the faithless one, as he would now be loving a blue eye and a black one at the same time.
Still, I did not like the business at all, and as I felt sure that Toni would be considerably the loser by it, I was determined to save him if I could.
"It will be the worse for you if you take her," I said. "For one thing, you will not be able even to call her your better half. With those contradictory eyes she will, at the very utmost, only be your better two quarters. Depend upon it, she must have been formed from the ribs of two different men. Have nothing to do with her, Toni, my boy!"
Whereupon Toni became abusive, and told me never to regard him as a friend again.
"Who are you to talk to me like that?" he cried. "You are not my father, or my mother, or my elder brother, or my married sister, or even my godfather, are you? Who are you to ride roughshod over my happiness? I don't care a rap what you say, and stand out of my way, or I'll punch your head. I mean to have her in any case now."
So, as I certainly could not say that I was his father, or even his godfather, I had to stand aside and let him go galloping headlong downhill towards the Vale of Matrimony without the brake on. If he were particularly fortunate, he might, perhaps, plump into a ditch when halfway down, and so come off cheaply with a broken arm; if, however, he were doomed to be unlucky, he would plunge to the bottom of the valley and break his neck.
Nevertheless, he was lucky, and fell off his high horse when he was only halfway down.
One evening he came to me full of a great resolution.
"Well, old chap, I'm not going to marry Nelly after all."
"She has jilted you, I suppose?"