“Good heavens—oh, no! no! I don’t quite know what she thought.” (He lowered his eyes.) “But it wasn’t that.”
“That’s a mercy at any rate!”
Braybrooke still kept his eyes on the ground, but a dogged look came into his face, and he said, speaking more resolutely:
“I’m afraid I alarmed dear Miss Cronin.”
“How perfectly splendid!” said Miss Van Tuyn.
“She is very fond of you.”
“Much fonder of Bourget!”
“I don’t think so,” he said, with emphasis. “She is so devoted to you that quite inadvertently I alarmed her. After all, we were—we were”—nobly he decided to take the dreadful plunge—“we were two elderly people talking together as elderly people will, I thought quite freely and frankly, and I ventured—do forgive me—to hint that a great many men must wish to marry you; young men suited to you, promising men, men with big futures before them, anxious for a brilliant and beautiful wife.”
“That was very charming and solicitous of you,” said Miss Van Tuyn with a smile. “But I don’t know that they do!”
“Do what?” said Braybrooke, almost losing his head, as he saw the vision in the distance, now cloaked and gloved, rustling in an evident preparation for something, which might be departure or might on the other hand be approach.