“I am so glad,” Mr Gresham continued, “of this lucky chance of speaking to you uninterruptedly.” Then for the first time he hesitated.
“I—you,” he went on, “you must know, Miss Raynsworth, how much interest I have come to feel in—you, and—in all that concerns you.”
Philippa glanced up quickly. What was coming? His words would normally have admitted of but one interpretation, but something in his tone, its calm, almost business-like deliberateness, made her doubtful. For the moment she was on the point of availing herself of this preamble as an opening for what she had made up her mind to say. Then she hesitated, and while she did so he went on.
“I—I am not impulsive, Miss Raynsworth. I am considerate by nature, and in anything involving not only my own happiness but that of another, I am deeply conscious that it behoves me to be doubly so. A mistake may be made in two minutes which a lifetime cannot undo. So you will not misunderstand me if I confess that it has taken me many weeks—nay, months—to decide upon—”
There was no doubt now, he was going to propose to her, and with the disappearance of all uncertainty on this head, her own resolution revived. In her nervousness she was for the moment unconscious of the curious egotism of his words, of the entire absence of any nobility of self-forgetfulness, any touch of impassioned feeling in his manner. Her own generosity of character failed to realise its absence in him; her one uppermost impulse was to prevent him in the slightest degree from acting in the dark.
“Stop, Mr Gresham,” she said, hurriedly; “before you say any more I have something to say to you.”
She gave a little gasp; she felt herself growing pale. Something made her look up. Instead of the expression of surprise which she had unconsciously expected to meet in his face, her quick instincts perceived a slight stiffening, a sort of indescribable drawing-back instead of eager protest that nothing she could say would alter his longing for her to hear him out.
And could she have seen into her companion’s mind at that moment, she would scarcely have believed the reflections she would there have read.
“She has something to tell,” he was thinking to himself. “I have not been too cautious.”
And aloud he said, quietly: