“Oh, no,” said Nelly, with compunction, “I beg your pardon, that was not what I meant. We have known you a long time, Mr. Molyneux, and I am sure have always looked upon you as—a friend.”
“Well, as—a friend,” he said, in the same pathetic tone, “might I not be allowed to say something when I saw that you were being deceived? Dear Miss Eastwood, could I stand by, do you think, knowing all I do of you, and see a man making his way into your esteem under false pretences?”
“Making his way into my esteem?” cried Nelly with frank laughter. “Please don’t be so solemn. You can’t think surely for a moment that I cared for that old Sir Alexis!”
“You are quite sure you don’t?” cried the lover, brightening up.
“Sure! Now didn’t I say it was all jealousy?” cried Nelly, laughing; but when she had said the words she perceived the meaning they might bear, and blushed violently, and stopped short, as people in embarrassing circumstances constantly do.
“You are quite right, as you always are,” said Molyneux, stopping too, and putting himself directly in front of her. If it were not that the women who are being proposed to are generally too much agitated to perceive it, a man about to propose has many very funny aspects. Young Molyneux placed himself directly in Nelly’s way; he stood over her, making her withdraw a step in self-defence. His face became long, and his eyes large. He put out his hands to take hers, if he could have got them. “Yes, you are right,” he said, more lachrymose than ever; “you are always right. I should be jealous of an angel if he came too near you. I am jealous of everybody. Won’t you say something? Won’t you give me your hand? I don’t care for anything in the world but you, or without you.”
“Mr. Molyneux!” cried Nelly, drawing a little back, with her heart beating and her cheeks burning, in the soft, starry twilight. He had got her hands somehow, in spite of her, and was advancing closer and closer. How unforeseen and unintended it all was! Neither of them had meant anything half-an-hour ago of this tremendous character. But Molyneux by this time felt sure that his life depended upon it, and that he had thought of nothing else for ages; and Nelly’s heart beat so loud that she thought it must be heard half a mile off, and feared it would leap away from her altogether. Their voices grew lower and lower, their shadows more confused in the young moonlight, which made at the most but a faint outline of shadow. There grew to be at last only a murmur under the bare branches, all knotted with the buds of spring, and only one blot of shade upon the path, which was softly whitened by that poetic light. This happened in the Lady’s Walk, which was on the other side of the lawn from the elm-trees, narrower, and quite arched and overshadowed with branches. The pink had scarcely gone out of the sky overhead, and the one star was still shining serenely in its luminous opening, when the whole business was over. You might have been in the garden without seeing, and, certainly, without hearing; but then matters were delightfully arranged for such interviews in the leafy demesne of The Elms.
“Oh, dear! I have forgotten my primroses,” said Nelly, “and what will they think of us in-doors?”
“Never mind; Railton has been very busy talking to your mother about bricks and slates,” said Molyneux, with a laugh of irrepressible triumph. They both laughed, which was mean of Nelly.
“Oh, hush! What has poor Major Railton to do with it?” she said. She was leaning against a lime-tree, a spot which she always remembered. It was cold, but neither of them felt it. Nelly’s little toes were half frozen, and she did not mind.