'Yes—well?' She stared at him in a fascinated manner.
'Well—Bridget—I can't milady you. We're man and woman and nothing else to-night....'
She interrupted. 'I like you to say that. I feel now that WE, at least, are real—not social shams.'
'Bridget—you said you'd never found yet a Real Man to love you. Here's one.' He patted his broad chest with his open palm. 'I'm a rough Bushy and there's not a frill about me, but I'm bed-rock if you come to Reality. I'm a lode you've never struck in your life before. There's payable gold here, if you choose to work me.'
She laughed nervously, considering him.
'Mr McKeith, I'm sure that you're a perfect Mount Morgan, and you certainly have a most original way of putting things. Do you happen to own a gold mine, by the way?'
He drew in his breath slowly, as if he were considering the check, then he took her cue.
'Oh, well! I have pegged out a good many claims in my time and never got much more than my tucker out of any of them—though there was a show I came on once up the Gulf way that I've always been a bit sorry I didn't stop and look into. But rations were short and the Blacks bad.... However, that's neither here nor there, now. Gold mine or not, I'm positive that I shall be a rich man before many years have passed—all the richer for a true mate to stand by me.'
'Yes, of course,' she said hastily—'I wasn't thinking of that—whether you were rich or not, I mean.'
'I know you weren't. All the same, I suppose your grand relations would consider me a presumptuous boor for daring to lift my eyes to you. And yet, if I could make you love me, it wouldn't count for a blade of grass that your father was born in a castle and mine in a crofter's cabin.... Only—you know too—' he became timid and hesitant again—'you know it isn't that I don't feel you as far above me, almost, as those stars in the sky....'