“Marrying—you, Sir Tom!”
“Yes, me. People will say I am a fortune-hunter like the rest.”
Lucy could not bear even this censure suggested by himself. She had been looking at him seriously all the time, showing her emotion only by the changing color of her face, which, indeed, it was not very easy to see. Now she made a hasty movement of impatience, stamping her foot upon the ground. “No!” she said. “No! they would not dare to say that. It would not be true.”
“It would be true so far that, if you were a little girl without any fortune, I should not dare to ask you to marry me, for I am a poor man; but not any worse than that. Will you marry me, Lucy?” Sir Thomas said. He let her hands go free, and held out his own. He was not afraid like the others. It can not even be said that he had much doubt what the answer would be.
Lucy had not shrunk from him, nor shown any appearance of timidity. She sat quite quietly looking at him, her eyes showing through the gathering twilight, but not much else. There was a little quiver about her mouth, but that did not show.
“Must I be married at all?” she said, in a very low voice.
This chilled Sir Thomas a little, for he had expected a much warmer reply. He had thought it possible that she would fling herself upon his breast, and receive his proposal with the same soft enthusiasm with which she had welcomed his coming. He forgot how young she was, how child-like, and how serious and dutiful in every new step she had to take.
“Yes,” he said, with a little jar in his voice, “unless you are always to be running the gantlet through a string of suitors. You like me, Lucy?”
“Oh, Sir Tom, yes!”
“And I—” he stopped the other words on his own lips; he would be honest and no more; he would not say love, which indeed was a word he knew he had soiled by ignoble use, and employed ere now in a very different sense. “And I,” he said, “am very fond of you.”