“Miss Pennycuick, I now understand everything.  You are completely justified.  It is I who have been to blame.”  And he then, in precise language, such as no real lover could have used, but still as prettily as was possible under the circumstances, requested the honour of her hand in marriage.

To his astonishment, she laughed.  It was a wild-sounding cackle, and quickly turned into a wail.

“Ah-h!  Ah-h-h!” She faced him again, head up and hands down.  “That, Mr Carey, is the one way out of it that is utterly, absolutely, eternally impossible.”

“Why?” he demanded, with his man’s dull incomprehension, and went on to demonstrate that there was no other.  “I do not wish,” he lied chivalrously, “to take any other.  I—­I—­believe me, I am not ungrateful for your—­for your thinking a great deal more of me than I deserve.  I will try to show myself worthy—­”

A magnanimous arm attempted to encircle her.  She backed from it, and rose hurriedly from her chair, with what he would have imagined a gesture of repulsion if he had not known her, from her own showing, so over-eager for his embraces.  He rose too.

“Do not!” she cried breathlessly, passionately.  “As if I could dream—­What can you think of me, to imagine that I would for a moment —­”

She broke from him and ran towards the door, sobbing, with her handkerchief to her eyes.  In three strides he was there before her, cutting off her retreat; so she swung back into the room, cast herself on the floor beside a sofa, and throwing up her arms, plunged her head down between them into the depths of a large cushion, which smothered cries that would otherwise have been shrieks.  She abandoned all effort to control herself, except the effort to hide, which was futile.

Guthrie Carey’s first feeling was of alarm, lest anyone should hear and come in to see what was the matter; he felt like wanting to guard the door.  But in a minute or two his soft heart was so worked upon by the spectacle before him that he could think of nothing else.  However little he might want to marry Mary Pennycuick, he was not going to be answerable for this sort of thing; so he marched resolutely to the sofa, and stooped to lift the convulsed creature bodily into his arms.

He might as well have tried to grasp a sleeping porcupine.

“How dare you?” she cried shrilly, whirling to her feet, dilating like a hooded snake before his astonished eyes.  “How dare you touch me?” He was too cowed to answer, and she stood a moment, all fire and fury, glaring at him, her tear-ravaged face distorted, her hands clenched; then she whirled out of the room, and this time he made no effort to stop her.

He dropped back on the sofa, and said to himself helplessly: 

“Well, I’m blowed!”