“Now who has been talking to you?” cried Armitage angrily. “No one was to know anything about it.”
“Lord, it is better I should know. Otherwise how could I have understood the depth of your goodness to me?”
“Now you really mustn’t,” he expostulated. “It really is not what you think. I—I am sure your father would gladly have given you a dowry. It was I who refused it.”
Danaë withdrew her hands from his knee. “I am sorry you thought I deserved this of you, lord.”
“Oh, you won’t understand!” cried Armitage desperately. “Our customs are different from yours. With us it is the highest compliment to be willing to marry a girl without a dowry.”
Danaë’s aggrieved attitude was slightly modified, though her silence showed that she considered the custom, however honourable to the lady, likely to be inconvenient in practice. But Armitage was evidently waiting anxiously for some remark. “I am glad you have told me this, lord,” she said, in a repressed voice. “But I am also glad that my sister told me the truth. I might—I might have asked you for money.”
“I hope you would not have had to do that in any case. Of course you will have your own allowance, which you will spend exactly as you like.”
She lifted brimming eyes to his face for a moment then, mindful of her lesson, raised the corner of his coat and pressed it to her lips. Armitage rose abruptly.
“My dear girl, you mustn’t make so much of the most ordinary things. I—I hope we shall be very happy together, I’m sure. But I don’t know that I shall be able to spare you a year at Klaustra; six months or—or three—is more likely. I shall come now and then to see how you are getting on, and if I find that the improvement in you justifies it, don’t you know—— Oh, hang it! why will you make me talk like a prig?—well, I shall take you away.”
“Yes, lord,” was the meek and sorrowful reply, and Armitage realised that he was in danger of presenting himself to his bride as a tyrant depriving her little by little of what she was looking forward to as the most absolutely blissful period of her life. He spoke hurriedly.