He laid one hand on her arm, and pointed with the other to the guests in the distance, all leaving the tent on the way to their carriages.
“Your good name will be restored to you,” he said, “on the day when I make you my wife. The worst enemy you have cannot associate my name with a suspicion of theft. Remember that and think a little before you decide. You see those people there. If you don’t change your mind by the time they have got to the cottage, it’s good-by between us, and good-by forever. I refuse to wait for you; I refuse to accept a conditional engagement. Wait, and think. They’re walking slowly; you have got some minutes more.”
He still held her arm, watching the guests as they gradually receded from view. It was not until they had all collected in a group outside the cottage door that he spoke himself, or that he permitted Isabel to speak again.
“Now,” he said, “you have had your time to get cool. Will you take my arm, and join those people with me? or will you say good-by forever?”
“Forgive me, Alfred!” she began, gently. “I cannot consent, in justice to you, to shelter myself behind your name. It is the name of your family; and they have a right to expect that you will not degrade it—”
“I want a plain answer,” he interposed sternly. “Which is it? Yes, or No?”
She looked at him with sad compassionate eyes. Her voice was firm as she answered him in one word as he had desired. The word was—
“No.”
Without speaking to her, without even looking at her, he turned and walked back to the cottage.
Making his way silently through the group of visitors—every one of whom had been informed of what had happened by his sister—with his head down and his lips fast closed, he entered the parlor and rang the bell which communicated with his foreman’s rooms at the stables.