“Look here. I’ll tell you,” says Hardinge’s voice at this moment. “After all, you are her guardian—her father almost—though I know you scarcely relish your position; and you ought to know about it, and perhaps you can give me your opinion, too, as to whether there was anything in it, you know. The fact is, I,”—rather shamefacedly—“asked her for a flower out of her bouquet, and she gave it. That was all, and,” hurriedly, “I don’t really believe she meant anything by giving it, only,” with a nervous laugh, “I keep hoping she did!"
A long, long sigh comes through the professor’s lips straight from his heart. Only a flower she gave him! Well——
“What do you think?” asks Hardinge after a long pause.
“It is a matter on which I could not think.”
“But there is this,” says Hardinge. “You will forward my cause rather than your brother’s, will you not? This is an extraordinary demand to make I know—but—I also know you."
“I would rather see her dead than married to my brother,” says the professor, slowly, distinctly.
“And——?” questions Hardinge.
The professor hesitates a moment, and then:
“What do you want me to do?” asks he.
“Do? ‘Say a good word for me’ to her; that is the old way of putting it, isn’t it? and it expresses all I mean. She reveres you, even if——”
“If what?”
“She revolts from your power over her. She is high-spirited, you know,” says Hardinge. “That is one of her charms, in my opinion. What I want you to do, Curzon, is to—to see her at once—not to-day, she is going to an afternoon at Lady Swanley’s—but to-morrow, and to—you know,”—nervously—“to make a formal proposal to her.”
The professor throws back his head and laughs aloud. Such a strange laugh.
“I am to propose to her—I?” says he.
“For me, of course. It is very usual,” says Hardinge. “And you are her guardian, you know, and——”
“Why not propose to her yourself?” says the professor, turning violently upon him. “Why give me this terrible task? Are you a coward, that you shrink from learning your fate except at the hands of another—another who——”
“To tell you the truth, that is it,” interrupts Hardinge, simply. “I don’t wonder at your indignation, but the fact is, I love her so much, that I fear to put it to the touch myself. You will help me, won’t you? You see, you stand in the place of her father, Curzon. If you were her father, I should be saying to you just what I am saying now.”
“True,” says the professor. His head is lowered. “There, go,” says he, “I must think this over.”
“But I may depend upon you”—anxiously—“you will do what you can for me?”
“I shall do what I can for her."
CHAPTER XIV.
“Now, by two-headed
Janus,
Nature hath framed strange
fellows in her time.”