She was silent, accepting, with a dullness of compliance, the overmastering sense of his determination, her will for the moment existing as something benumbed within her. The dashing of the sea beneath them broke through its own monotony, and, with her consciousness of it, a remembrance of Merrington’s early words rushed to her mind. She drew herself up with a snapping of the spell that had held her.
“You told me once that you had never been conquered, but the days are past when a man carries a wife by storm. Shall we go on, Mr. Merrington?”
“Jacqueline, do you love me?”
She had started forward, but at the tense question, fell back against the railing of the balcony. There was that in the calm of Merrington’s manner that left her breathless.
“I believe you do love me in your heart of hearts,” he said, the passion of his tones thrilling through the words, though he stood rigidly erect before her. “You may not know it, but you do, and I am going to make you know it, because I cannot live without your love, which, being mine, you shall not keep from me.”
“Oh!” she cried, facing him at her full height, “how I hate you for that! Love you! From the first moment you spoke to me I have disliked you. You are a cave-dweller! A savage! Such men as you don’t want wives. They want mates.”
V.
The next day Jacqueline was not on the beach, but as the day was Sunday, and as he knew her aversion to holiday crowds, Merrington did not take this as any indication that she especially desired to avoid him. In the afternoon Peggie, who always did what she was wanted to do without asking, proposed to her cousin that they stop with their roadcart and take up Jacqueline and Brinton. But Jacqueline had a headache, so Brinton said, as he mounted to the seat beside Peggie, leaving Merrington in solitary state behind the grays all the way to Seabright and back. When he dropped in casually that evening to see his friend, Mr. Selwyn met him with the intelligence that Jacqueline and her cousin had gone out for an informal tea with friends. Things began to look serious. Peggie, whose ears and eyes had been open, hailed Merrington as he sauntered slowly up her front walk.
“No one at home but papa, eh, Geof? I felt that headache of Jacqueline’s was a bluff. What gave it to her?”
“Don’t ask questions,” he returned, a little disconsolately.