"Do you think you could like the man himself. Miss Betsey? Mind you, it ain't all talking with me! It's going to be real, hard, downright doing--livin' off what my own farm raises, and wearin' homespun off the backs of my own sheep, like a habitant; freezing on to every copper cent I can scrape, and laying it all by. It will be a hard and a dull life for the first year or two; but it's a good farm, and well-stocked, and in three or four years' time, when I have bought a new reaper, and a few such tricks, and brought in another hundred acres of useless bush, with my own hard work and the hired boys, I believe things will be on the road to grow better than ever; for, though maybe you would not think it, I have thrown away a deal of money on nonsense in my time. But that's over now. What do you think of it yourself. Miss Betsey?"
Betsey turned and looked at him with opening eyes, and met a steadfast gaze more bewildering still, which made her drop them again, and look away. "Think? I think it sounds brave in you to speak like that. A man should never lose heart!"
"But it's yourself, I mean. Would you like it yourself?"
"If I were a man, that's how I'd like to be. I'd love to play the man so."
"But it ain't the man you'd be expected to play. Miss Betsey. It would be the wife."
Betsey coloured and looked a little hurt. "It's too serious a subject to play with, Mr. Webb."
"But it ain't play. It's good, downright, honest earnest I mean."
"I don't understand you."
"Could you bring yourself to marry a fellow who has lost his money, and is hard up?"
"I don't know, Mr. Webb," she laughed uncomfortably, and a little inclined to take offence at such a catechism being pressed on her, while she sat helpless in the hurrying "trap." "It would depend altogether on who the 'fellow' was."