"If you came you would not be more entertaining than Heine, would you?" asked Maggie, looking mockingly down into his gray eyes.
"Damn Heine," thought Geoffrey, as he lifted himself up over the rocks. Miss Windsor huddled herself far into a corner of the niche. There was plenty of room for two there after all; yet Geoffrey seated himself in a most uncomfortable attitude, with his stick over his knees, and looked earnestly at her.
"He has come after the stocks and bonds," said Maggie to herself, as she steeled her heart against his winning face and his manly simplicity of manner. She tried to say something about the sea and the view, but he looked at her earnestly, and said, in a low, hurried voice:
"Miss Windsor, I have sought you out to-day with a definite purpose. I sincerely hope that you were not displeased at seeing me. You know why I wish to see you."
Maggie turned away her head; there was a sincere ring to his voice; could it be possible that he really cared for her, loved her, Maggie Windsor? Ah, no; she remembered Mrs. Carey, and said nothing.
"Miss Windsor—Maggie," he said, "I know that I have no right to ask you to marry me, save that I love you with a single heart."
"Oh, Mr. Doubleface," she thought, "how fair you talk!" She still said nothing, but tapped the stone in front of her nervously with the end of her little boot.
"I have nothing to offer you," continued Geoffrey, "except my love and my name; I do not even know whether I even have a life to give you."
Maggie was startled by this; she did not understand it at all. Geoffrey waited for her to say something, and there was a depressing pause for a moment.
She felt that she had grown pale, and her fingers twitched convulsively at the handle of her parasol. Here was her lover saying to her all that she had dreamed he might say, saying in an earnest, trembling voice that he loved her; in a voice so different to his customary tone of banter, that she for a moment almost believed in his sincerity; yet as she averted her face and looked over the bay she could see clearly in her mind's eye the little picture which had remained in it from yesterday—her lover holding Mrs. Carey in his arms.