‘It would be sufficient,’ answered the unhappy man. ‘But—’
She looked up with a reproachful smile, and shook her head. ‘That summer,’ she went on, ‘you asked me ten times if you asked me once. I am older now; much more of a woman, you know; and my opinion is changed about some people; especially about one.’
‘O Anne, Anne!’ he burst out as, racked between honour and desire, he snatched up her hand. The next moment it fell heavily to her lap. He had absolutely relinquished it half-way to his lips.
‘I have been thinking lately,’ he said, with preternaturally sudden calmness, ‘that men of the military profession ought not to m—ought to be like St. Paul, I mean.’
‘Fie, John; pretending religion!’ she said sternly. ‘It isn’t that at all. It’s Bob!’
‘Yes!’ cried the miserable trumpet-major. ‘I have had a letter from him to-day.’ He pulled out a sheet of paper from his breast. ‘That’s it! He’s promoted—he’s a lieutenant, and appointed to a sloop that only cruises on our own coast, so that he’ll be at home on leave half his time—he’ll be a gentleman some day, and worthy of you!’
He threw the letter into her lap, and drew back to the other side of the gable-wall. Anne jumped up from her seat, flung away the letter without looking at it, and went hastily on. John did not attempt to overtake her. Picking up the letter, he followed in her wake at a distance of a hundred yards.
But, though Anne had withdrawn from his presence thus precipitately, she never thought more highly of him in her life than she did five minutes afterwards, when the excitement of the moment had passed. She saw it all quite clearly; and his self-sacrifice impressed her so much that the effect was just the reverse of what he had been aiming to produce. The more he pleaded for Bob, the more her perverse generosity pleaded for John. To-day the crisis had come—with what results she had not foreseen.
As soon as the trumpet-major reached the nearest pen-and-ink he flung himself into a seat and wrote wildly to Bob:—
‘Dear Robert,—I write these few lines to let you know that if you want Anne Garland you must come at once—you must come instantly, and post-haste—or she will be gone! Somebody else wants her, and she wants him! It is your last chance, in the opinion of—
‘Your faithful brother and well-wisher,
‘John.‘P.S.—Glad to hear of your promotion. Tell me the day and I’ll meet the coach.’