He looked round as if he thought she had lost her senses. “Why, Miss Clara, what do you mean?”
She clasped her hands, and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Did you ever,” she asked, addressing, apparently, a wreath of stucco faces there—“did you ever witness such obtuseness?”
He stared at her a moment, standing; then he sat down, and continued looking at her intently.
“And did you ever witness such inconsistency?” she continued, still to the stucco faces. “He pretends to like me, and in the same breath tells me that he won’t have me—as if I had asked him to!”
“Miss Clara!”
She glanced at him disdainfully, and returned to her communication with the ceiling. “I shall not, however, break my heart for him.”
Over the sailor’s weather-beaten face a soft, uncertain light was stealing, as you may sometimes see the morning light steal over the face of a rugged bluff, covering it with beauty.
“Clara,” he said—she had heard him speak to the little ones in that low voice—“do you mean to say that you will marry me?”
“Captain Cary,” she replied, with an expression of excellent candor and good sense, “how am I to marry a man who won’t ask me?”
Then Captain Cary asked her.