“Elfride, what have you to say to this?” inquired her father, coming up immediately Stephen had retired.
With feminine quickness she grasped at any straw that would enable her to plead his cause. “He had told me of it,” she faltered; “so that it is not a discovery in spite of him. He was just coming in to tell you.”
“COMING to tell! Why hadn’t he already told? I object as much, if not more, to his underhand concealment of this, than I do to the fact itself. It looks very much like his making a fool of me, and of you too. You and he have been about together, and corresponding together, in a way I don’t at all approve of—in a most unseemly way. You should have known how improper such conduct is. A woman can’t be too careful not to be seen alone with I-don’t-know-whom.”
“You saw us, papa, and have never said a word.”
“My fault, of course; my fault. What the deuce could I be thinking of! He, a villager’s son; and we, Swancourts, connections of the Luxellians. We have been coming to nothing for centuries, and now I believe we have got there. What shall I next invite here, I wonder!”
Elfride began to cry at this very unpropitious aspect of affairs. “O papa, papa, forgive me and him! We care so much for one another, papa—O, so much! And what he was going to ask you is, if you will allow of an engagement between us till he is a gentleman as good as you. We are not in a hurry, dear papa; we don’t want in the least to marry now; not until he is richer. Only will you let us be engaged, because I love him so, and he loves me?”
Mr. Swancourt’s feelings were a little touched by this appeal, and he was annoyed that such should be the case. “Certainly not!” he replied. He pronounced the inhibition lengthily and sonorously, so that the “not” sounded like “n-o-o-o-t!”
“No, no, no; don’t say it!”
“Foh! A fine story. It is not enough that I have been deluded and disgraced by having him here,—the son of one of my village peasants,—but now I am to make him my son-in-law! Heavens above us, are you mad, Elfride?”
“You have seen his letters come to me ever since his first visit, papa, and you knew they were a sort of—love-letters; and since he has been here you have let him be alone with me almost entirely; and you guessed, you must have guessed, what we were thinking of, and doing, and you didn’t stop him. Next to love-making comes love-winning, and you knew it would come to that, papa.”