“Good Lord!” he cried, impatiently, “you talk as if all I wanted was to get her into a noose.”

“Well, isn’t it?  Perhaps I’m stupid, but I thought the whole reason for bringing her down here was because—­”

“Because we thought there was no other way,” he finished, in a tone of exasperation.  “But if there is another way—­”

“I’m not at all sure that there is,” she retorted, with a touch of asperity, to keep pace with his rising emotion.  “Don’t begin to think that because I said Mr. Pruyn was coming round to it he’s obliged to do it.”

“No; but if there was a chance—­”

“Of course there’s always that.  But what then?”

“Well, then—­there’d be no particular reason for rushing the thing to-night.  But I don’t know, though,” he continued, with a sudden change of tone; “we’re here, and perhaps we might as well go through with it.  All I want is her happiness; and since she can’t be happy in her own home—­”

Diane laughed softly, and he stopped once more in his walk to look down at her.

“There’s one thing you ought to understand about Dorothea,” she said, with a little air of amusement.  “You know how fond I am of her, and that I wouldn’t criticise her for the world.  Now, don’t be offended, and don’t glower at me like that, for I must say it.  Dorothea isn’t unhappy because she hasn’t a good home, or because she has a stern father, or because she can’t marry you.  She’s unhappy because she isn’t getting her own way, and for no other reason whatever.  She’s the dearest, sweetest, most loving little girl on earth, but she has a will like steel.  Whatever she sets her mind on, great or small, that she is determined to do, and when it’s done she doesn’t care any more about it.  When I was with her, I never crossed her in anything.  I let her do what she was bent on doing, right up to the point where she saw, herself, that she didn’t want to.  If her father would only treat her like that, she—­”

“She wouldn’t be coming down here to-night.  That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Oh no!  How can you say so?”

“I can say so, because I think there’s a good deal of truth in it.  I’m not without some glimmering of insight into her character myself; and to be quite frank, it was seeing her set her pretty white teeth and clinch her fist and stamp her foot, to get her way over nothing at all, that first made me fall in love with her.”

“Then I will say no more.  I see you know her as well as I do.”

“Yes, I know her,” he said, confidently, marching on again.  “I don’t think there are many corners of her character into which I haven’t seen.”

Several remarks arose to Diane’s lips, but she repressed them, and they continued their walk in silence.  During the three or four turns they took, side by side, up and down the terrace, she divined the course his thought was taking, and her speech was with his inner rather than his outer man.  Suddenly he stopped, with one of his jerky pauses, and when he spoke his voice took on a boyish quality that made it appealing.