Her companion supplies it, “Marry;” and to her ears it seems that an awkwardness like her own has remodulated his familiar voice.
There are more crocuses this year than last, pushing their yolk-yellow goblets through the grass; two or three have even invaded the gravel walk.
“Is the idea disagreeable to you?” asks the young man, in a key to whose agitated diffidence the girl is a stranger.
“Disagreeable! why should it be?” replies she, trying vainly to shake off the oppressive absurdity of that new shyness which has laid hands on them both. “Have not I been looking it in the face all my life? Didn’t we agree yesterday that it was I who originally proposed to you?”
“You have had a good many accesses of hatred to me since then,” he says hesitatingly.
“Yes, I have,” replies she, hotly, both cheeks hanging out flame signals; “but you always know what produces them, and it lies with you to prevent them ever recurring. I hated you when I found that that wretched little pro-Boer poem in the Shipton Herald was by you; and I detested you when you said that if by any extraordinary accident you were killed on a battle-field, your wounds would certainly all be in the back!”
Her loss of self-control seems to give him back his.
“I got seven shillings and sixpence for my poem,” he says good-temperedly. “And as for the battle-field, let us hope that my legs—they are good long ones—will carry me back unpeppered to your arms.”
CHAPTER IV
Lavinia tries to frown, but the whimsical way in which her cousin utters his disgraceful aspiration, coupled with her conviction that, if put to the test, he would prove how little his claim to consummate cowardice was worth, sends her into the dining-room with a smile on her face. The tone in which Sir George asks her what the joke is at once extinguishes it.