“But it’s not as bad as that,” he pleaded. “No, by Jove, it’s not. You’ll not be so cruel. Come, Miss Mary, listen to me a minute. You must marry someone, you know. You are young, and I’m sure you have the right to choose——”
“I’ve heard enough,” she struck in, interrupting him with something of Sir Robert’s hauteur. “I understand now what you meant, and I forgive you. But I can never be anything to you, Mr. Flixton——”
“You can be everything to me,” he declared. It couldn’t, it really couldn’t be that she meant to refuse him! Finally and altogether!
“But you can be nothing to me!” she answered, cruelly—very cruelly for her, but her cheek was tingling. “Nothing! Nothing! And that being so, I beg that you will leave me now.”
He looked at her with a mixture of supplication, resentment, chagrin.
But she showed no sign of relenting. “You really—you really do mean it?” he muttered, with a sickly smile. “Come, Miss Mary!”
“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried, as if his words pained her. And that was all. “Please go! Or I shall go.”
The Honourable Bob’s conceit had been so far taken out of him that he felt that he could make no farther fight. He could see no sign of relenting, and feeling that, with all his experience, he had played his cards ill, he turned away sullenly. “Oh, I will go,” he said. And he longed to add something witty and careless. But he could not add anything. He, Bob Flixton, the hero of so many bonnes fortunes, to be refused! He had laid his all, and pour le bon motif at the feet of a girl who but yesterday was a little schoolmistress. And she had refused him! It was incredible! But, alas, it was also fact.
Mary, the moment his back was turned, hurried with downcast face towards the Kennels; to hide her hot cheeks and calm her feelings in the depths of the shrubbery. Oddly enough, her first thoughts were less of that which had just happened to her than of that suit which had been paid to her months before. This man might love her or not; she could not tell. But Arthur Vaughan had loved her: the fashion of this love taught her to prize the fashion of that.
He had loved her. And if he had treated her as Mr. Flixton had treated her? Would she have held to him, she wondered. She believed that she would. But the mere thought set her knees trembling, made her cheeks flame afresh, filled her with rapture. So that, shamefaced, frightened, glancing this way and that, as one hunted, she longed to be safe in her room, there to cry at her ease.