“Oh no—I just looked into them, that was all.”
“Make a bonfire of ’em directly you get home. I meant to do it myself. I can’t think what possessed me ever to collect them. I have only a few professional hand-books now, and am quite a practical man. I am in hopes of having some good news to tell you soon, and then do you think you could—come to me again?”
“I would rather you did not press me on that just now,” she replied, with some feeling. “You have said you mean to lead a new, useful, effectual life; but I should like to see you put it in practice for a little while before you address that query to me. Besides—I could not live with you.”
“Why not?”
Grace was silent a few instants. “I go with Marty to Giles’s grave. We swore we would show him that devotion. And I mean to keep it up.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind that at all. I have no right to expect anything else, and I will not wish you to keep away. I liked the man as well as any I ever knew. In short, I would accompany you a part of the way to the place, and smoke a cigar on the stile while I waited till you came back.”
“Then you haven’t given up smoking?”
“Well—ahem—no. I have thought of doing so, but—”
His extreme complacence had rather disconcerted Grace, and the question about smoking had been to effect a diversion. Presently she said, firmly, and with a moisture in her eye that he could not see, as her mind returned to poor Giles’s “frustrate ghost,” “I don’t like you—to speak lightly on that subject, if you did speak lightly. To be frank with you—quite frank—I think of him as my betrothed lover still. I cannot help it. So that it would be wrong for me to join you.”
Fitzpiers was now uneasy. “You say your betrothed lover still,” he rejoined. “When, then, were you betrothed to him, or engaged, as we common people say?”