She burst into tears anew.
"Oh, that I should have to beg a man to marry me! I hate myself—I hate you!"
Her hatred, however, did not prevent repetitions of the scene. At the last repetition that need trouble us here her tears conquered. The helpless Buck comforted her after the only fashion he knew anything about—the fashion he would have used towards her maid—on his knee.
He still, however, called her "Miss."
They were privately married in the June of 1869.
"Don't call me 'Miss'!" she broke out petulantly one day in the middle of the honeymoon. "And you are not to have your meals with the servants! I shall lunch in my room to-day, and you are to be ready to take me out at three o'clock."
"Yes, m'm," said Buck.
Probably Lord Moone had less to do than he supposed with the separation that took place in the September of the same year. We may assume that a much more potent factor was the Honourable Mrs. Causton's remembrance of her own words, "That I should have to beg a man to marry me! I hate myself—I hate you!" She did very soon hate both herself and him. Poor Buck merely hated the whole subversive anomaly.
He accepted the proposal that they should separate with perfect docility. It seemed to him entirely right. Indeed the only thing he had not accepted with docility had been his introduction to Lord Moone, on the only occasion on which the two men ever met, as "Mr. Buckley, the drawing-master." Buck hadn't liked that much. He had made himself Buck Causton in nine hours of terrific combat, and as Buck Causton he preferred to be known. But all else he suffered with touching obedience, and at the proposal that they should go their several ways his finger flew to his forehead.
"Yes, miss," he said; and his heart, if not his lips, murmured the prayer that begins: "God bless the Squire and his relations——"