It was pleasing to meet someone who thought of her part in the bargain that had been made.
"Different!" exclaimed Nasmith. "Ah, Nancy, it will be worse drudgery than anything you have known. You speak like a child. You don't know what you are saying. Do you think marriage is play?"
"I have to be married. My father said so."
"Do you know what your father did?" said the man, emboldened by his pity. "Do you know that your father offered to marry you to me?"
This was a question the girl was wholly unready to face. The swift progress of their conversation had carried her too far.
"And I refused," said Nasmith, determined to have it out, "I refused because he asked impossible terms. He wanted to keep you till you were twenty, would not let you go to school as I asked, would not let you be brought up with my nieces. I was a fool. I should have kept my claim upon you. You are not Chinese, Nancy, you have no right to be Chinese. And now you are to be thrown away because of my obstinacy and your father's blindness."
"You are not my father," said the girl indignantly; "he is not blind. I am Chinese. I am Chinese—I must go home. I talk too much."
She stood up. Anger and despair fought in her brain. She felt helpless before Nasmith's outspoken manners, a prey to her stupid frankness in encouraging him.
"Don't go," begged the man. "I suppose you think I am rude, but I had to speak out my mind. It is our Western way, you know. I keep forgetting you are not used to it. I can't keep quiet when I see anything as wicked as this marriage to which you are being sacrificed. If I went to your father to-day, don't you think he would hear me? If I told him to have his own way, to keep you where he pleased till you are twenty, couldn't we break this engagement?"
"We don't break engagements," the girl answered proudly. She turned cool, almost cold in her firmness, now that Nasmith had been betrayed into what she felt was a dishonorable weakness. "My father doesn't change and I don't change. We have promised."