“Probably not. But I am quite able to protect myself, thank you, and I have Maurice to appeal to.”
“Ah, but it wouldn’t look well for him to come to blows with his rival,” said Armitage, with unexpected shrewdness. “I don’t signify, you see. And if you would just give me the right, I could polish him off before starting, and you would be free from him while I was gone.”
“Starting! Why, where are you going?”
“Oh, that business over there,” jerking his head vaguely in the direction of Therma. “Will you? You can’t think how much easier it would make my mind.”
Zoe looked at him quizzically, still unaware of the gravity of the occasion. “What a boy you are!” she said, as she had often said before. “You really force me to ask you why you can’t pick a quarrel with him—not that I want you to,” hastily; “in fact, I forbid it—without a mandate from me.”
“Because I wouldn’t quarrel with a brute like that—especially about a lady. But if I could say to him, ‘Princess Zoe is engaged to me, and if I catch you bothering her any more, you had better look out——’ why, either he takes a back seat, or I kick him for a cad.”
“But I am not engaged to you,” said Zoe involuntarily.
“No, but I want you to be. I have cared for you an awfully long time, and you have always been frightfully good to me. I don’t bore you as much as some people, do I?—not as much as he does, at any rate? Couldn’t you think of it?”
“I really couldn’t.” Zoe was hardly able to regard this very unconventional proposal as serious, but she managed to speak without a smile. “I should need something more in a man than that he didn’t bore me—a good deal more. In fact, I should need so much that I shall never marry at all.”
“If you would only try me!” he pleaded. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to please you.”