‘About the sugar-crop?’ Nora put in once more, with provoking calmness.
‘Well, Nora, you may smile if you like,’ Tom said warmly; ‘but this is a very serious subject, I can tell you, for both of us. What I mean to say is that Uncle Theodore and I have settled it would be a very good thing indeed if we two were to get up a match between us.’
‘A match between you,’ Nora echoed in a puzzled manner—‘a match between papa and you, Tom! What at? Billiards? Cricket? Long jumping?’
Tom fairly lost his temper. ‘Nonsense, Nora,’ he said testily. ‘You know as well what I mean as I do. Not a match between Uncle Theodore and me, but a match between you and me—the heir and heiress of Orange Grove and Pimento Valley.’
Nora stared at him with irrepressible laughter twinkling suddenly out of all the corners of her merry little mouth and puckered eyelids. ‘Between you and me, Tom,’ she repeated incredulously—‘between you and me, did you say? Between you and me now? Why, Tom, do you really mean this for a sort of an offhand casual proposal?’
‘Oh, you may laugh if you like,’ Tom Dupuy replied evasively, at once assuming the defensive, as boors always do by instinct under similar circumstances. ‘I know the ways of you girls that have been brought up at highfalutin’ schools over in England. You think West Indian gentlemen aren’t good enough for you, and you go running after cavalry-officer fellows, or else after some confounded upstart woolly-headed mulatto or other, who come out from England. I know the ways of you. But you may laugh as you like. I see you don’t mean to listen to me now; but you’ll have to listen to me in the end; for Uncle Theodore and I have made up our minds about it, and what a Dupuy makes up his mind about, he generally sticks to, and there’s no turning him. So in the end, I know, Nora, you’ll have to marry me.’
‘You seem to forget,’ Nora said haughtily, ‘that I too am a Dupuy, as much as you are.’
‘Ah, but you’re only a woman, and that’s very different. I don’t mind a bit about your answering me no to-day. It seems I’ve tapped the puncheon a hit too early; that’s all: leave the liquor alone, and it’ll mature of itself in time in its own cellar. Sooner or later, Nora, you see if you don’t marry me.’
‘But, Tom,’ Nora cried, abashed into seriousness for a moment by his sudden outburst of native vulgarity, ‘this is really so unexpected and so ridiculous. We’re cousins, you know; I’ve never thought of you at all in any way except as a cousin. I didn’t mean to be rude to you; but your proposal and your way of putting it took me really so much by surprise.’
‘Oh, if that’s all you mean,’ Tom Dupuy answered, somewhat mollified, ‘I don’t mind your laughing, no, not tuppence. All I mind is your saying no so straight outright to me. If you want time to consider’——