“Mrs. Loring says you are to propose to me, Millicent.”
“Mrs. Loring says you would be ashamed to give in after so long, Rollo.”
“You are afraid, Millicent, that I shall say it’s sudden?”
“I am not afraid of anything that you will say. Or do,” she added, as I took her hands across Mrs. Loring.
“Then,” I replied, “I have the honour to ask you, Miss Dixon——”
This was too much for Mrs. Loring. She burst through our hands, and stood, trembling, staring, lost, hysterical. Then fled.
When the moon, a timid débutante in a faint sky, rose behind the clipped boxhedge, we were still in the arbour, Millicent and I. One of her hands shone with an unaccustomed jewel—it had been my mother’s ring—and her other was in my personal and private keeping.
“I believe, Rollo,” she said, “that you are still little more than a boy.”
“Millicent,” I replied, “I realise less now than ever the prospect of being grown up. I am merely grown out—though scarcely more so than Loring,” I added.