“Yes, a Nature's nobleman; you couldn't have described him better. A man I should have been proud to call a brother, and who loved you not for your miserable pelf, for that was nothing to him, but for yourself, and with a good honest love. And he would have made you happy, Mary, not by giving way to you as you might imagine from his unfailing good temper and gentleness, but by being your master. For that is what you want, Mary—a man that will rule you. And Yewdell was that sort of man, gentle but firm—”
“Oh, do be original, Tom, and say something pretty about a steel hand under a silk glove.”
“Ah, well, you may scoff if you like, but perhaps you regret now that you went so far with him. A mercenary man, or even a mean-spirited man, would have put up with it perhaps, and followed you still. He respected himself too much to do that. He paid you the greatest compliment a man has it in his power to pay a woman, and you did not know how to appreciate it. You scorned him, and he turned away from you for ever. If you were to go to him now, though you cast yourself on your knees before him, to ask him to renew that offer, he would look at you with stony eyes and pass on—”
“Stony fiddlesticks! That just shows, Tom, how well you know your own sex. Why, Mr. Yewdell and I are the best friends in the world, and he writes to me almost every week, and very nice letters, only too long, I think.”
Her brother stared at her and almost gasped with astonishment.
“Well, I am surprised and glad,” he said, recovering his speech at last. “It was worth crossing the Atlantic only to hear this.”
“Don't make any mistake, Tom. I am no more in love with him now than when we were in Italy together.”
“All right, Mary. In future I shall do nothing but abuse him, and then perhaps it will all come right in the end. And now about this letter from Fan. Will you go down to that place where she is staying?”
“I don't know, I should like to go. I have not yet made up my mind.”
“Do go, Mary; and then I might run down and put up for a day or two at the 'Cow and Harrow,' or whatever the local inn calls itself, to have a stroll with you among those brown and yellow woods she writes about.”