“It seems to me a very handsome provision,” I replied, thinking that Mrs. Esther had about the same.
“Yes, it will do.”
He fanned his face with his hat, and begged me to sit down on the grass and listen to him for a moment. Men, even the most careless, like Sir Miles, have a way of becoming suddenly solemn when they ask a woman to become their wife. I know not whether their gravity springs from a sense of their own great worth, or from a feeling of unworthiness; whether it is a compliment to the woman they woo, or to themselves. Or it may be a confession of the holiness of the state of matrimony, which one would fain hope to be the case.
Sir Miles then, blushing and confused, offered me, for the second time, his hand.
“You see,” he said, “the right hand doth no longer shake, nor doth the left hand hold a pot of October. I no longer am carried home at night.” He sighed, as if the reminiscence of past times was pleasing but saddening. “I am not any more the man that once I was. Will you, sweet Kitty—will you be Lady Lackington?”
“I cannot,” I said.
“There is an income of six hundred pounds a year,” he went on. “I believe there is a small house somewhere; we could live in it rent-free. You were always fond of hens and pigs, and milk, flowers, apples, and all these things. I will keep two hundred pounds for myself, and give you four. With two hundred I shall have to manage, once a week or so, a little hazard, or a trifling lansquenet.”
“What?” I asked. “Marry a gamester?”
“What matter as to that, when he will settle his money on his wife? Think of it, Kitty. I am a baronet, though a poor one, and of as good a family as any in Norfolk. Why the Lackingtons, as everybody knows, were on their lands before the Conqueror.”
“And if it is not enough to be a gamester, you are also—O Sir Miles! the shame of it——”