"I was terribly frightened by my own imagination, before I saw him," I answered. "After I saw him, I soon got over it."
"So you say!" he rejoined.
There is something excessively provoking—at least to me—in being told to my face that I have said something which is not worthy of belief. It was not a very becoming act on my part (after what he had told me in his letter about his brother's infatuation) to mention his brother. I ought not to have done it. I did it, for all that.
"I say what I mean," I replied. "Before I knew what you told me about your brother, I was going to propose to you, for your sake and for his, that he should live with us after we were married."
Oscar suddenly stopped. He had given me his arm to lead me through the crowd—he dropped it now.
"You say that, because you are angry with me!" he said.
I denied being angry with him; I declared, once more, that I was only speaking the truth.
"You really mean," he went on, "that you could have lived comfortably with my brother's blue face before you every hour of the day?"
"Quite comfortably—if he would have been my brother too." Oscar pointed to the house in which my aunt and I are living—within a few yards of the place on which we stood.
"You are close at home," he said, speaking in an odd muffled voice, with his eyes on the ground. "I want a longer walk. We shall meet at dinner-time."