Hardyman suddenly stood still, and emphasized his next words by digging his stick into the grass.
“If anything I have said has vexed you,” he began, “tell me so plainly, Miss Isabel, and I’ll ask your pardon. But don’t throw my rank in my face. I cut adrift from all that nonsense when I took this farm and got my living out of the horses. What has a man’s rank to do with a man’s feelings?” he went on, with another emphatic dig of his stick. “I am quite serious in asking if you like me—for this good reason, that I like you. Yes, I do. You remember that day when I bled the old lady’s dog—well, I have found out since then that there’s a sort of incompleteness in my life which I never suspected before. It’s you who have put that idea into my head. You didn’t mean it, I dare say, but you have done it all the same. I sat alone here yesterday evening smoking my pipe—and I didn’t enjoy it. I breakfasted alone this morning—and I didn’t enjoy that. I said to myself, She’s coming to lunch, that’s one comfort—I shall enjoy lunch. That’s what I feel, roughly described. I don’t suppose I’ve been five minutes together without thinking of you, now in one way and now in another, since the day when I first saw you. When a man comes to my time of life, and has had any experience, he knows what that means. It means, in plain English, that his heart is set on a woman. You’re the woman.”
Isabel had thus far made several attempts to interrupt him, without success. But, when Hardyman’s confession attained its culminating point, she insisted on being heard.
“If you will excuse me, sir,” she interposed gravely, “I think I had better go back to the cottage. My aunt is a stranger here, and she doesn’t know where to look for us.”
“We don’t want your aunt,” Hardyman remarked, in his most positive manner.
“We do want her,” Isabel rejoined. “I won’t venture to say it’s wrong in you, Mr. Hardyman, to talk to me as you have just done, but I am quite sure it’s very wrong of me to listen.”
He looked at her with such unaffected surprise and distress that she stopped, on the point of leaving him, and tried to make herself better understood.
“I had no intention of offending you, sir,” she said, a little confusedly. “I only wanted to remind you that there are some things which a gentleman in your position—” She stopped, tried to finish the sentence, failed, and began another. “If I had been a young lady in your own rank of life,” she went on, “I might have thanked you for paying me a compliment, and have given you a serious answer. As it is, I am afraid that I must say that you have surprised and disappointed me. I can claim very little for myself, I know. But I did imagine—so long as there was nothing unbecoming in my conduct—that I had some right to your respect.”
Listening more and more impatiently, Hardyman took her by the hand, and burst out with another of his abrupt questions.
“What can you possibly be thinking of?” he asked.