"Yes," he continued, "I love Dorothy Chance with all my heart and soul, and mean to make her my wife as soon as a good opportunity offers. Father don't like the match, though he likes the girl. He loves money, and he wants me to kneel down with him and worship the golden calf. I won't do it. If I can't have Dolly, I'll have no one else. That's the plain downright truth, Nancy Watling. Do you wish me to take your farm on shares now?"
"Certainly not, Mr. Gilbert Rushmere," drawing herself up, with a withering air of spurious dignity. "If you can forget your good old family, and stoop so low as to marry a girl that your father picked out of the dirt, you may stay at home with her. I don't want to have anything to do with you. I don't wonder at Mr. Rushmere not giving his consent to such a vulgar connection. It is enough to break the honest heart of the poor old man. His only son, too—the last of his name. Mr. Gilbert Rushmere, you astonish me!"
"I have heard all these arguments before," said Gilbert, sorry for his misplaced confidence, when it was too late. "I consider them mere words, and take them for what they are worth. I thought it would be best to act like a man, and give you my real reasons for rejecting your kind offer. I have satisfied my conscience, and I leave you to think of me as you like. But here we are at your gate, Nancy, so I will wish you good night."
Nancy Watling deigned no reply to his farewell salutation, but walked indignantly across her moon-lighted lawn. She felt mortified, disappointed, and decidedly belligerent. True, she had not made him an offer of marriage, but it was tantamount to it; and he had despised both her and her money, and all for a penniless black-eyed dairy-maid, who might be his father's daughter for aught he knew to the contrary.
It was a strange story, at any rate, his finding the dead woman and the child out on the heath. She remembered what the village gossips had whispered about it, at the time, and she determined to publish a new edition of the long-forgotten scandal.
She would be revenged on Gilbert, for the insult he had passed upon her, let it cost what it might. As for Gilbert, what need she care about him—if he did not accept her and her farm, another would. He was a rude brute, a vulgar, low fellow, to treat any lady as he had that night treated her. If he married that base-born creature Dorothy, no respectable person would ever enter the house.
While such uncharitable thoughts were passing through Nancy Watling's small, narrow mind, Gilbert, glad to be rid of his disagreeable charge, took his homeward path across the heath. Sometimes he stopped—not to admire the cloudless beauty of the sky—he was a careless observer of the beauties of nature—but to put his hands to his sides, and laughed with uncontrollable merriment.
He was amused at his own cleverness—rejoicing over the adroit manner in which he had got rid of the odious woman, and her self-interested offers of service.
"I am rid of her at last. I'm thinking she'll come after me no more. I don't approve of women giving such broad hints to us men folk. It was as good as asking me to be her husband. I can tell black Nancy that she's no wife for Gilbert Rushmere. Does she think that I would sell myself to age, ill-temper and ugliness, for all the money in the Bank of England? I would rather go to church with Dolly in homespun, than ride in a carriage beside that shrivelled piece of tanned leather. How Dolly will laugh when I tell her how affectionately the old thing hugged my arm! A partnership with her, ha, ha! is it not rare fun to disappoint her matrimonial speculations?"
To Dorothy, this visit of Miss Watling's to the farm proved everything but a laughing matter.