She was therefore a little surprised and puzzled, but agreeably so—for the new was always agreeable to Daisy, who had been from her cradle shaped for adventure—when there stepped out from under the foliage a tall, gentlemanly man with a cane, who lifted his hat and said "Good evening"—not awkwardly but with a certain smooth ease. His face and hers were in the shadow of the gatepost; but there seemed something faintly familiar about his voice.
"Shall we go out where it's light, and take a look at each other?" he said.
Daisy, withholding speech—she had found out by experience that it was a good rule to let the other, when a stranger, do all the talking for the first few moments—let her companion precede her through the gate.
In the full light of the street-lamp he stopped, turned, rested his cane on the pavement, and looked down at her as she came out from behind the big stone post. Daisy, with a heightening of her surprise, yet with a certain familiar thrill she could not quite explain, looked up into the pleasant eyes of Harrison's guest.
She saw a man whose appearance, in every last detail, mutely vocalized that elusive and often misapplied term "gentleman"—his quiet clothes, worn unconsciously as an outward cuticle; not a muscle at constraint, either in his clean-cut friendly face or his easily-standing figure—because self had been wholly forgotten and his interest, by the polite habit of years of breeding, transferred spontaneously and with pleasant solicitude to his companion. His hair, in which a hue of gray showed, was cut sensibly and short. Although hair and skin proclaimed him an elderly man, there was about him a general air of frankness, of enthusiasm, of almost boyish eagerness, that made Daisy "take to" him in a companionable sense, at once.
Ware, on his part, saw a girl, bright and dimpling, perusing him with eyes that coruscated with sophistication and wariness—armed cap-a-pie in every virile nerve and muscle—not a bit timorous, but flashingly on guard, with every faculty at its sentry-post. He saw a girl whose lashes twinkled irrepressibly, and whose lips had to be pressed hard against the smile-impulse. He saw a girl, whose regal color and roundness and poise, and clear eyes and skin were a proclamation of health and vigor that he who ran might read. He saw a girl whom many little uncouthnesses of manner and attire showed "green" and undeveloped—in short, susceptible of tillage as a bit of wild but fertile garden-ground.
"I'm going to marry you, you know," he said, quietly, with no more preface than the friendliest of all smiles.
There! It was out—said as Sir William had long ago decided he would say it—without preamble, smoothly, quietly, as though it were a thing that had been arranged ages ago, and he were simply reminding her of it.
Ware watched the girl's face with keen curiosity—his glance steady, but so pleasant withal, that Daisy did not find it disconcerting. The girl looked back at him—her face first shortening and dimpling to a half-smile; then lengthening to sobriety; then gathering and dimpling again, and remaining so, because that was Daisy Nixon's natural expression. Daisy knew nothing about hypnotic suggestion. All she knew was that she seemed surrounded by some queer influence. She seemed—to put it the way it presented itself to her—as though she had stepped into a book or a moving-picture or a dream.