“You bade me think no more of him, and I obeyed. But—but I never had any thought of him.”
That did irritate the old man; it seemed to him that she played with him. In a rage he struck his cane on the ground. “Damme!” he exclaimed. “That’s womanlike all over! Give her what she wants and she doesn’t want it. But, see here, I’ll not have it, girl. I know your flimsies and you’ve got to have him! Do you hear?”
He was enraged by this queer twist in her, and he blustered. But his anger—and he felt it—lacked something of force. He did not know how to bring it to bear. And when she did not reply to him at once, “Do you forget that he saved my life?” he cried, dropping to a lower level. “D’you forget that, you ungrateful wench?”
“But he did not save mine, sir!” she answered, with astonishing spirit. “Yet it is mine that you ask me to give him. And indeed, indeed, sir, he does not love me.”
“Then why should he want you?” he retorted. “But he’ll soon make you sure of that, if you’ll let him. And you’ve got to take him. You’ve got to take him. Let’s ha’ no more words about it. I’ve said the word.”
“But I’ve not, sir,” she replied, with that new and astonishing courage of hers. “And I cannot say it. I am grateful to him, I shall ever be grateful to him for saving you—and he is my cousin. But he does not love me, he has never made love to me. And am I, your daughter, to—to accept him, the moment it suits him to marry me?”
That touched the Squire’s pride. It gave him to think. “Never made love to you?” he exclaimed. “What do you mean, girl?”
“Until he came to me in the garden on Tuesday he never—he never gave me reason to think that he would come. Am I,” with a tremor of indignation in her voice, “of so little account, is that which you have just told me that I may some day bring to him so little, that I must put all in his hand the moment he chooses to lift it?”
The Squire was bothered by that, and “You are like all women!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know where to ha’ you. That’s where it is. You twist and you turn, and you fib——”
“I am not fibbing, sir.”