“What’s the matter? Why, nothing, of course. You simply amused me, that is all.” And smiling stiffly, he threw up his head with a sort of shake and made as though he would join the party on the porch.
This time Alice did not rotate on the pivot, but, standing firm, became the centre of revolution herself, and brought Charley to a “front face” again, by a sturdy pull upon his arm, and began to move slowly forward, as though to return to the Argo. “What is it?” asked she, looking up into his face with eager interest. “Do tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Why you act so strangely? Which of the two, then?”
These words threw Charley into his brown study again. Looking far away, with drawn lids, he was silent for some time. “Alice,” said he, turning slowly and looking into her eyes, “I am going to surprise you.”
“Neither Mary nor Lucy, you are going to say!” And her snowy bosom beat with thick-thronging breaths. “O-o-oh, I know,” cried she, with a look of pain. “He is married already!”
Yet why with a look of pain? Ought she not rather on her friend’s account to have rejoiced? But here was a hero evaporated; and in this humdrum treadmill of our life there is so little of romance! And do we not all of us, men and children alike, strain our eyes against the darkened sky, regretful that the flashing but all too evanescent meteor has passed away into the abyss of night?
Charley smiled. “How fearfully and wonderfully is woman made! You first ask me for information which I do not possess, but which it appears you do, then answer your own question; then when I am about to say something, you tell me what I am about to say; and then—with a little shriek—discover the mare’s nest I am about to reveal! No, I was not going to say ‘neither Lucy nor Mary,’ nor yet that the Don was married. I was about to make a proposition to you. Are you really very anxious to have it decided whether it is Mary or Lucy?”
“Very.”
“Then I know but one way: ask the Don himself.”