“Not half so good,” cried Harry, “as being man and wife! My house might all be at sixes and sevens, and you could not help me to manage it, living here; and you would never let me be of any use to you. Don’t you see? if we were married I could give you everything you wanted, it would be natural. We should get on together, I know. I should never grudge you anything, and your mother could come back to her old home, and I should see to her comfort too. Whereas here, living as we are, what can I do?—or you for me?” said Harry. “Ah! that’s all nonsense about being friends. It isn’t your friend I want to be.”
“What you say is very curious to me,” said Hester. “There is a great deal that is very fine in it, Cousin Harry. To offer to give me all that is very nice of you, and I should like to help you to manage your house. I have often thought I should like to try—very likely I should not succeed, but I should like to try.”
“It is the easiest thing in the world,” he said with a smile that was tender, and touched Hester’s heart. “As soon as ever you marry me—”
“But the preliminary is just what I don’t like,” said Hester. “I would rather not marry—anyone. I don’t see the need for it. We are very well as we are, but we don’t know what a new state of things might do for us.”
“I know,” said Harry, “what it would do for me. It would make me very happy and comfortable at home, which I am not now. It would settle us both in life. A young fellow is thought nothing of till he is married. He may go off to the bad at any time, he may take a wrong turn; and in business he is never relied upon in the same way. When he has a wife he has given hostages to society, they say—that is what it would do for me. Except being richer and better off, and able to make your mother comfortable, and so forth, I can’t say, of course, what it would do for you.”
“Nor I either,” she said gravely. “All these things would be very good: but it might make me into something I shouldn’t like. I feel afraid of it. I have no inclination to it, but all the other way.”
“By Jove!” said Harry, which was an exclamation he never used save when very hard bested, “that is not very complimentary to me.”
“Did you wish me to pay you compliments? No; we are arguing out the general question,” said Hester, with her serious face.
Harry was at his wits’ end with impatience and provokedness, if we may use such a word. He could have seized her with his hands and shaken her, and yet, all the time, he was still conscious that this strange treatment drew a fellow on.
“I suppose all this means that you won’t have me?” he said, after a pause.
“I think so, Cousin Harry. I am not satisfied that it would do us any good; but don’t rush away in a temper,” she said, laying her hand lightly on his arm. “Don’t be vexed; why should you? I don’t mean to vex you. If I don’t see a thing in the same light as you do, that is no reason why you should be angry.”
“By Jove!” said Harry again, “if a man is not to be vexed when he’s refused, I wonder what you think he’s made of?—not flesh and blood.”
“Sense,” said Hester, “and kindness. These are things you are made of, whether you are angry or not.”
She had risen up, and stood looking at him, as he turned round hastily and made for the door; but this flattery (if it was flattery) stopped him. He turned round again and stood looking at her, tantalised, provoked, soothed, not knowing what to say.
“If you think all that of me, why won’t you have me?” he said, stretching out wistful hands towards her.
Hester shook her head.
“I don’t want to have—anyone,” she said.
Mrs. John had been listening on the stairs. Not listening—she was too far off to hear a word—but waiting for the indications which a step, a sound of movement, the opening of a door, might give. The stair was an old oaken one at the end of the passage, hidden in the evening dimness; dark at any time even in the day. When the door did open at last, though it did so with a little jar as from an agitated hand, yet two voices came out, and the sound of their conversation was not angry, nor like that of people who had quarrelled. But, on the other hand, it was not low like the talk of lovers; and Mrs. John could not conceive it possible that if he had been accepted Harry would have left the house without seeing her. That was impossible. Either nothing had been said on the subject, or else—But what else? She was confounded, and could not tell what to think. Hester went out with him to the verandah door. It was she who did most of the talking. She called out to him something that sounded like “Don’t be long of coming back,” as he went out. Mrs. John by this time had hurried out of the staircase, and rushed to a window whence she could see him departing. He turned round and waved his hand, but he also shook his head with a look more completely lover-like than Mrs. John had yet seen him cast at her child. It was full of tender reproach, yet pleasure, disappointment, but also something that was far from despair. “It is all very well for you to say so,” he said. What did it mean? Mrs. John hurried down when he had disappeared,
