“Tell me—­I beg you will tell me—­is her engagement absolutely certain?”

“I feel sure it is.”

“No!  I want more than that.  Do you know that it is?”

“I can only say that her father believes it to be a certain thing.  No announcement has yet been made.”

“H’m!  Then it isn’t settled at all.”

Piers sat stiffly upon his chair.  He held an ivory paperknife, which he kept bending across his knee, and of a sudden the thing snapped in two.  But he paid no attention, merely flinging the handle away.  Mrs. Hannaford looked him in the face; he was deeply flushed; his lips and his throat trembled like those of a child on the point of tears.

“Don’t!  Oh, don’t take it so to heart!  It seems impossible—­after all this time——­”

“Impossible or not, it is!” he replied impetuously.  “Mrs. Hannaford, you will do something for me.  You will let me come down to Malvern, whilst she is with you, and see her—­speak with her alone.”

She drew back, astonished.

“Oh! how can you think of it, Mr. Otway?”

“Why should I not?” he spoke in a low and soft voice, but with vehemence.  “Does she know all about me?”

“Everything.  It was not I who told her.  There has been talk——­”

“Of course there has”—­he smiled—­“and I am glad of it.  I wished her to know.  Otherwise, I should have told her.  Yes, I should have told her!  It shocks you, Mrs. Hannaford?  But try to understand what this means to me.  It is the one thing I greatly desire in all the world, shall I be hindered by a petty consideration of etiquette?  A wild desire—­you think.  Well, the man sentenced to execution clings to life, clings to it with a terrible fierce desire; is it less real because utterly hopeless?  Perhaps I am behaving frantically; I can’t help myself.  As that engagement is still doubtful—­you admit it to be doubtful—­I shall speak before it is too late.  Why not have done so before?  Simply, I hadn’t the courage.  I suppose I was too young.  It didn’t mean so much to me as it does now.  Something tells me to act like a man, before it is too late.  I feel I can do it.  I never could have, till now.”

“But listen to me—­do listen!  Think how extraordinary it will seem to her.  She has no suspicion of——­”

“She has!  She knows!  I sent her:  a year ago, a poem—­some verses of my writing, which told her.”

Mrs. Hannaford kept silence with a face of distress.

“Is there any harm,” he pursued, “in asking you whether she has ever spoken of me lately—­since that time?”

“She has,” admitted the other reluctantly, “but not in a way to make one think——­”

“No, no!  I expected nothing of the kind.  She has mentioned me; that is enough.  I am not utterly expelled from her thoughts, as a creature outlawed by all decent people——­”

“Of course not.  She is too reasonable and kind.”