‘Never!’ Nora interrupted quickly in a sharp voice of unswerving firmness.
‘Never, Nora? Never? Why never?’
‘Because, Tom, I don’t care for you; I can’t care for you; and I never will care for you. Is that plain enough?’
Tom stroked his chin and looked at her dubiously, as a man looks at an impatient horse of doubtful temper. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Nora, you’re a fine one, you are—a very fine one. I know what this means. I’ve seen it before lots of times. You want to marry some woolly-headed brown man. I heard you were awfully thick with some of those people on board the Severn. That’s what always comes of sending West Indian girls to be educated in England. You’ll have to marry me in the end, though, all the same, because of the property. But you just mark my words: if you don’t marry me, as sure as fate, you’ll finish with marrying a woolly-headed mulatto!’
Nora rose to her full height with offended dignity. ‘Tom Dupuy,’ she said angrily, ‘you insult me! Leave the house, sir, this minute, or I shall retire to my room. Get back to your sugar-canes and your centrifugals until you’ve learned better manners.’
‘Upon my word,’ Tom said aloud, as if to himself, rising to go, and flicking his boot carelessly with his riding-whip, ‘I admire her all the more when she’s in a temper. She’s one of your high-steppers, she is. She’s an uncommon fine girl, too—hanged if she isn’t—and, sooner or later, she’ll have to marry me.’
Nora swept out of the boudoir without another word, and walked with a stately tread into her own room. But before she got there, the ludicrous side of the thing had once more overcome her, and she flung herself on a couch in uncontrollable fits of childish laughter. ‘Oh, Aunt Clemmy,’ she cried, ‘bring me my tea in here, will you? I really think I shall die of laughing at Mr Tom there!’
CHAPTER XVI.
For a few days, the Hawthorns had plenty of callers—but all gentlemen. Marian did not go down to receive them. Edward saw them by himself in the drawing-room, accepting their excuses with polite incredulity, and dismissing them as soon as possible by a resolutely quiet and taciturn demeanour. Such a singularly silent man as the new judge, everybody said, had never before been known in the district of Westmoreland.
One afternoon, however, when the two Hawthorns were sitting out under the spreading mango-tree in the back-garden, forgetting their doubts and hesitations in a quiet chat, Thomas came out to inform them duly that two gentlemen and a lady were waiting to see them in the big bare drawing-room. Marian sighed a sigh of profound relief. ‘A lady at last,’ she said hopefully. ‘Perhaps, Edward, they’ve begun to find out, after all, that they’ve made some mistake or other. Can—can any wicked person, I wonder, have been spreading around some horrid report about me, that’s now discovered to be a mere falsehood?’