‘Don’t,’ she exclaimed, shaking her head, but not shaking the sprigs out of her hair. ‘You are taking unwarrantable liberties, Mr. Jasper.’
‘I will take no more.’ He folded his arms on the sill. She did not see, but she felt, the flood of love that poured over her bowed head from his eyes. She worked very hard fastening off a thread at the end of a tucker.
‘I also,’ said Jasper, ‘have been desirous of a word with you, Barbara.’
She turned, looked up in his face, then bent her head again over her work. The flies, among them a great bluebottle, were humming in the window; the latter bounced against the glass, and was too stupid to come down and go out at the open sash.
‘We understand each other,’ said Jasper, in a low voice, as pleasant and soft as the murmur of the flies. ‘There are songs without words, and there is speech without voice: what I have thought and felt you know, though I have not told you anything, and I think I know also what you think and feel. Now, however, it is as well that we should come to plain words.’
‘Yes, Jasper, I think so as well, that is why I have come over here with my tuckers.’
‘We know each other’s heart,’ he said, stooping in over her head and the garnishing of mignonette, and speaking as low as a whisper, not really in a whisper but in his natural warm, rich voice. ‘There is this, dear Barbara, about me. My name, my family, are dishonoured by the thoughtless, wrongful act of my poor brother. I dare not ask you to share that name with me, not only on this ground, but also because I am absolutely penniless. A great wrong has been done to your father and sister by us, and it does not become me to ask the greatest and richest of gifts from your family. Hereafter I may inherit my father’s mill at Buckfastleigh. When I do I will, as I have undertaken, fully repay the debt to your sister, but till I can do that I may not ask for more. You are, and must be, to me a far-off, unapproachable star, to whom I look up, whom I shall ever love and stretch my hands towards.’
‘I am not a star at all,’ said Barbara, ‘and as for being far off and unapproachable, you are talking nonsense, and you do not mean it or you would not have stuck bits of mignonette in my hair. I do not understand rhodomontade.’
Jasper laughed. He liked her downright, plain way. ‘I am quoting a thought from “Preciosa,”’ he said.
‘I know nothing of “Preciosa,” save that it is something Eve strums.’