“Indeed, sir, I have but sought to hold you to your duty.”
“My duty is owed to you, madam, and to no other lady.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. It seemed to me, Amelia, that some one else was speaking, and not I, the voice had so strange a sound.
“Indeed, madam—” the young gentleman had the grace to look ashamed—“I fear I must ask your kind allowance, for maybe the trick wasn’t altogether a fair one. When I had the honour of spending a considerable time in your company, in our voyage to Madrass, the constant intercourse with so much beauty and virtue produced upon my heart the effect that might have been anticipated——”
“Pray, sir, spare me your flattery,” I said, with some impatience, I fear.
“I’ll assure you, madam, I’m incapable of flattering you, even were the thing possible. But I must spin my yarn in my own style, if you please, or I will never get to the end of it. Well, madam, you must know that I became consumed with a desire to penetrate your true sentiments for me. Many and many a plot did I lay to surprise you, if possible, into some avowal that might justify me in believing that you entertained a partiality for me, but you was always at once so sprightly and so sedate, so reserved and so open, that I was in despair. Then one evening Miss Hamlin revealed the design with which you was going to Bengall—perhaps, madam, you recollect the occasion of her speaking?”
(He asked me that, Amelia, as though I could ever forget it!)
“The young lady’s words troubled me inexpressibly, madam,” he went on. “I have a cursed Scots pride about me” (yet I am well assured that Mr Fraser is proud of that pride, for all his calling it names), “that would not suffer the thought that I had been made a fool of. Such was the notion that came to me, madam, that you had been diverting yourself with my homage for the voyage, designing to throw me aside when ’twas over. But if the wound was bitter, the remedy was at hand. That very day I had been reading in ‘Amelia’ of the expedient by which Booth sought to prevent the discovery of his passion for the lady, in leading her to believe that he loved another. ‘Sure,’ I thought, ‘if my dearest Miss Freyne have any tenderness for me in her heart she must give me some hint of it now; and if my fears are truer than my hopes, yet I will come off with no apparent loss, and she without a triumph.’ The thought no sooner came to me than I acted upon it, as you, madam, know.”
“And so your punctilio was saved, sir!” I cried. “Indeed, it seems a mighty serious matter to be a Scotsman.”
“You wasn’t intending any reflection on my country, madam, I hope? But no, my dear Miss Freyne’s lips couldn’t utter such an unkindness. You know best, madam, how my scheme miscarried. Whether you did entertain any partiality for me, I won’t venture to say, but if so, you played your part with a cheerfulness and a spirit that left me no chance to discover it.”