“I have always told you,” smiling slightly at his remark and lowering her voice as she glanced apprehensively at a girl seated on a bench near by, “that I will not marry you as long as you live as you do. I have money enough for two, so it makes no difference whether the man I marry has any or not. But I can’t and won’t marry a—a worthless man—one who has never done anything, and is too indolent to do anything. I want a husband who has some ability—who has accomplished something—just one worthy thing even, and then—well, it won’t make so much difference if he is indolent afterwards. You know, Dick, how much I care for you,” softly, “how fond I am of you, but I will not marry you until you prove that you are able to do something.”
“It’s all very easy to talk about,” he replied savagely, “but what can I do? I don’t dare risk what little I have in Wall street. I don’t know enough to preach, or to be a doctor, or a lawyer, and it takes too infernally long to go back to the beginning and learn. You object to my following the races, and I couldn’t sell ribbons or run a hotel to save me. Tell me what to do, Penelope, and I will gladly make the attempt. When you took a—a craze to walk in the Park at a hideous hour every morning before your friends, who don’t think it good form, were out to frown you down, did I not promise to be your escort, and haven’t I faithfully got up—or stayed up—to keep my promise?”
“And only late—let us see how many times?” she asked roguishly.
“Penelope, don’t,” he pleaded. “You know I love you. Why, Penel’, love, if I thought that your foolish whim would separate us forever I’d——Oh, darling, you don’t doubt my love, do you?”
“Hush!” she whispered, warningly, pointing to the girl on the other bench.
“Oh, she is asleep,” Dick replied carelessly.
“Don’t be too sure,” Penelope urged, gazing abstractedly towards the girl, her eyes soft with the feeling that was thrilling her heart.
Like all girls Penelope never tired of hearing the man who had won her love swearing his devotion, but like all girls she preferred to be the sole and only listener to those vows, to that tone.
“If she is awake she is the first young woman I ever saw who would let her new La Tosca sunshade lie on the ground,” he said laughingly.
“She must be sleeping,” Penelope assented indifferently, glancing at the parasol lying in the dust where it had apparently rolled from the girl’s knee.