"Dear Sir Everard! I would do much to please him," said Dacia, softly.
"But you must not think I am trying to make love by proxy," continued Burgo. "It is on my own account I woo you--that you know full well. If I could only make love to you more pleadingly, and in softer fashion! but I can't. I know that in such things I am as uncouth as a bear; Nature has made me so; but, trust me, dearest, the bear knows how to love! Dacia, will you, dare you, take me with all my imperfections on my head? Search the world over, and nowhere will you find a truer, more devoted love than mine, nowhere a man who will strive harder than I to make you happy! O Dacia!--dearest!--what can I say more? I know my words must sound terribly trite and commonplace, but for once my tongue has turned traitor. Before I opened my lips I thought I was going to be eloquent in a way I had never been before, and the result is a thin, feeble trickle of words which seem to carry no conviction with them. It is most pitiable. Still, Dacia, it all comes to this: I love you!--I love you!"
To Dacia it seemed as if his words were lacking neither in eloquence nor passion; but then, no one had ever spoken to her in such fashion before; while there was such a fervour of sincerity in his utterances that even had she not been predisposed in his favour, her heart could scarcely have failed to be touched. It was her turn now to gaze straight before her. She durst not let her eyes meet his; she felt that they would have betrayed her in her own despite, and the moment for surrender had not yet come.
There was no coyness about Dacia, no shilly-shallying; she had a way of speaking straight to the point which was sometimes eminently disconcerting to others. She was unconventional, and she knew it.
"You ask me, Mr. Brabazon, whether I dare accept you," she said, trying her best to speak without any trace of emotion, but not quite succeeding. "I dare do a number of things; but when you further ask me whether I will accept you, your question becomes one which can only be met by a straightforward and categorical answer. My answer to it is, No--for your own sake."
"No--for my own sake!" gasped Burgo. "I wholly fail to apprehend your meaning."
"Have you considered, have you thought seriously, of all that is involved in your proposal to wed a girl who is both a cripple and a hunchback? No, you cannot have done so. You are letting a temporary infatuation (which before long will seem to you nothing more than am foolish dream which it were wise to forget as quickly as possible) blind you to the consequences of a step which you would soon see cause to bitterly rue that you had ever taken. I should be a clog and an incubus to you all your life, or at least till death stepped in and severed the tie between us. When you took me into society, which you would very quickly tire of doing, think of the lifted eyebrows and the meaning glances that would be shot from one to another, and of the whisperings behind your back! 'A cripple and a hunchback! what could he have been thinking about?' How you would writhe in your impotence and turn hot and cold by turns! And then your love for me would inevitably cool, and by-and-by it would change into positive dislike. Oh, I seem to see it all! Therefore, Mr. Brabazon, my answer is, No."
"But it is an answer which I utterly refuse to accept," he retorted impetuously. "If you have nothing to urge against my suit but that, you might just as well have left it unsaid for any effect it has upon me. Such an objection I brush away as the flimsiest of cobwebs. As for the hobgoblins you have tried to conjure up, they are the merest futilities, and you yourself would be the first to despise a man who did not laugh them to scorn. On that score you shall not despise me. For me the world holds no other woman than you, and that is enough. Dacia, you are mine!"
His arms enfolded her, he drew her to him, he kissed her again and again. His masterful style of love-making deprived her of all further power of resistance. But indeed her heart had been his long before.
Once she murmured while his arms were still round her, her eyes searching his the while, "Oh, but to think of it! a cripple and----" but she could not say more for the kiss that sealed her lips.