Material absolutely fresh and new! Molten and virgin gold, not yet resistable to the stamp of the die!
"Well," he said, stepping forward hospitably, "how are you, my dear? Shall we go in?"
"Yes." Daisy stepped inside, deliberately unpinned and hung up her hat, and sat down opposite to the baronet at the table he had chosen along the side of the room. It was the same table they had occupied on their previous visit.
"Don't order much," she said; "I'm not hungry. I came here to talk."
"I think," said Sir William, "that talking will be much more enjoyable. I dined late, myself. Suppose we have, say, a few grapes and a little something to drink—an iced drink of some sort."
"Anything you like," said Daisy. She laid her hands on the table, caught her lower lip under her teeth with a shy gesture that was delicious to Ware, and said—quite plainly, and without yielding to that impulse of coquetry which had made him so brief with her on their previous meeting—"Were you in earnest, that time you asked me to marry you?"
"My dear," answered Sir William, leaning forward, and extending his hand on the table until it was almost touching hers, "I made the proposal quite seriously and in good faith. I should not do otherwise. If you are still in a position to accept it, I make it again now."
Daisy looked across at the real eagerness in the fine eyes; at the face, with its skin cleanly and handsomely tinted under the few faint lines that indicated the light passage of the years; at the hand, smooth, white and gently masterful. Then she dropped her glance; but her voice was firm and her manner direct and frank as she answered him.
"I'll marry you," she said.
The white hand, with a strong and gentle pressure, came over hers, until her fingers were between the thumb and the heel of the palm. Something great and calm and authoritative seemed communicated with that touch. Daisy felt quelled and dutiful, but, best of all, as she lifted her eyes to his, she knew, less by his expression than by an unexplainable feeling within herself, that she could trust him. For in all essentials—so she read and knew calmly and surely that she read aright—he was, as Daisy herself would have put it, simply, "a gentleman."