“Quite so, that’s my view of matrimony, and I’m glad to see you appear to share it. . . .  Tell the truth, I was afraid you wouldn’t,” he added, with something more about the nuns and the convent.

I wanted to say that I didn’t, but my nervousness was increasing every moment, and before I could find words in which to protest he was speaking to me again.

“Our friends in the library seem to think that you and I could get along together, and I’m disposed to think they’re right—­aren’t you?”

In my ignorance and helplessness, and with the consciousness of what I was expected to do, I merely looked at him without speaking.

Then he fixed his monocle afresh, and, looking back at me in a curious way, he said: 

“I don’t think I should bore you, my dear.  In fact, I should be rather proud of having a good-looking woman for my wife, and I fancy I could give you a good time.  In any case”—­this with a certain condescension—­“my name might be of some use to you.”

A sort of shame was creeping over me.  The dog was yawning in my face.  My intended husband threw it off his knee.

“Shall we consider it a settled thing, then?” he asked, and when in my confusion I still made no reply (having nothing which I felt myself entitled to say), he said something about Aunt Bridget and what she had told him at luncheon about my silence and shyness, and then rising to his feet he put my arm through his own, and turned our faces towards home.

That was all.  As I am a truthful woman, that was everything.  Not a word from me, nay, not half a word, merely a passive act of silent acquiescence, and in my youthful and almost criminal innocence I was committed to the most momentous incident of my life.

But if there was no love-making, no fondling, no kissing, no courtship of any kind, and none of the delirious rapture which used to be described in Alma’s novels, I was really grateful for that, and immensely relieved to find that matters could he completed without them.

When we reached the house, the bell was ringing for tea and my father was coming out of the library, followed by the lawyers.

“So that’s all right, gentlemen?” he was saying.

“Yes, that’s all right, sir,” they were answering; and then, seeing us as we entered, my father said to Lord Raa: 

“And what about you two?”

“We’re all right also,” said his lordship in his drawling voice.

“Good!” said my father, and he slapped his lordship sharply on the back, to his surprise, and I think, discomfiture.

Then with a cackle of light laughter among the men, we all trooped into the drawing room.

Aunt Bridget in her gold-rimmed spectacles and new white cap, poured out the tea from our best silver tea-pot, while Nessy MacLeod with a geranium in her red hair, and Betsy Beauty, with large red roses in her bosom, handed round the cups.  After a moment, my father, with a radiant face, standing back to the fire, said in a loud voice: