“No indeed; I had not the courage,” said Sara. “I never have sense enough to do such things. Complain! oh, dear no; he did not complain. But he was so much in earnest about it, you know, apropos of that silly speech I made at luncheon, that he made me quite uncomfortable. Is he a—a gentleman, papa?”
“He is my clerk,” said Mr. Brownlow, shortly; and then the conversation dropped. Sara was not a young woman to be stopped in this way in ordinary cases, though she did stop this time, seeing her father fully meant it; but all the same she did not stop thinking, which indeed, in her case, was a thing very difficult to do.
Then Mr. Brownlow began to nerve himself for a great effort. It excited him as nothing had excited him for many a long year. He drew his child’s arm more closely through his own, and drew her nearer to him. They were going slowly down the avenue, upon which the afternoon sunshine lay warm, all marked and lined across by columns of trees, and the light shadows of the half-developed foliage. “Do you know,” he said, “I have been thinking a great deal lately about a thing you once said to me. I don’t know whether you meant it—”
“I never say any thing I don’t mean,” said Sara, interrupting him; but she too felt that something more than usual was coming, and did not enlarge upon the subject. “What was it, papa?” she said, clinging still closer to his arm.
“You refused Motherwell,” said Mr. Brownlow, “though he could have given you an excellent position, and is, they tell me, a very honest fellow. I told you to consider it, but you refused him, Sara.”
“Well, no,” said Sara, candidly; “refusing people is very clumsy sort of work, unless you want to tell of it after, and that is mean. I did not refuse him. I only contrived, you know, that he should not speak.”
“Well, I suppose that it comes to about the same thing,” said Mr. Brownlow. “What I am going to say now is very serious. You once told me you would marry the man I asked you to marry. Hush, my darling, don’t speak yet. I dare say you never thought I would ask such a proof of confidence from you; but there are strange turns in circumstances. I am not going to be cruel, like a tyrannical father in a book; but if I were to ask you to do such a great thing for me—to do it blindly without asking questions, to try to love and to marry a man, not of your own choice, but mine—Sara, would you do it? Don’t speak yet. I would not bind you. At the last moment you should be free to withdraw from the bargain—”
“Let me speak, papa!” cried Sara. “Do you mean to say that you need this—that you really want it? Is it something that can’t be done any other way? first tell me that.”
“I don’t think it can be done any other way,” said Mr. Brownlow sadly, with a sigh.
“Then of course I will do it,” said Sara. She turned to him as she spoke, and fixed her eyes intently on his face. Her levity, her lightness, her careless freedom were all gone. No doubt she had meant the original promise, as she said, but she had made it with a certain gay bravado, little dreaming of any thing to follow. Now she was suddenly sobered and silenced. There was no mistaking the reality in Mr. Brownlow’s face. Sara was not a careful, thoughtful woman; she was a creature who leaped at conclusions, and would not linger over the most solemn decision. And then she was not old enough to see both sides of a question. She jumped at it, and gave her pledge, and fixed her fate more quickly than another temperament would have chosen a pair of gloves. But for all that she was very grave. She looked up in her father’s face, questioning him with her eyes. She was ready to put her life in his hands, to give him her future, her happiness, as if it had been a flower for his coat. But yet she was sufficiently roused to see that this was no laughing matter. “Of course I will do it,” she repeated without any grandeur of expression; but she never looked so grave, or had been so serious all her life.