She bent her head slightly.  Her throat was dry,—­her heart was beating painfully,—­she knew Roxmouth’s crafty and treacherous nature, and her whole soul sickened as she realised that now he could, if he chose, drag the name of John Walden through a mire of social mud, and hold it up to ridicule among his own particular ‘set,’ who would certainly lose no time in blackening it with their ever-ready tar-brush.  And it was all through her—­all through her!  How would she ever forgive herself if his austere and honourable reputation were touched in ever so slight a degree by a breath of scandal?  Unconsciously, she clasped her little hands and wrung them hard—­Roxmouth saw the action, and quickly fathomed the inward suffering it indicated.

“You know my dearest ambition,”—­he went on,—­“and I need not emphasise it.  It is to call you my wife.  If you consent to marry me, you take at once a high position in the society to which you naturally belong.  But you tell me I am detestable to you—­and that you would rather die than accept me as a husband.  I confess I do not understand your attitude,—­and, if you will allow me to say so, I hardly think you understand it yourself.  You are in a state of uncertainty—­most women live always in that state;—­and your vacillating soul like a bewildered butterfly—­you see I am copying the clerical example by dropping into poetry!—­and a butterfly, not a cigarette, is I believe the correct emblem of Psyche,—­” here he took a whiff at his cigar, and smiled pleasantly—­“your soul, I repeat, like a bewildered butterfly, has lighted by chance on a full-flowering parson.  The flight—­the pause on that maturely-grown blossom of piety, is pardonable,—­but I cannot contemplate with pleasure the idea of your compromising your name with that of this sentimental middle-aged individual who, though he may be an excellent Churchman, would make rather a grotesque lover!”

She remained silent.  Glancing sideways at her, he wondered whether it was the moonlight that made her look so set and pale.

“But I said I would put a case before you,”—­he continued, “and I will.  Here are you,—­of an age to be married.  Here am I,—­anxious to marry you.  We are neither of us growing younger—­and delay seems foolish.  I offer you all I am worth in the world—­myself, my name and my position.  You have refused me a score of times, and I am not discouraged—­you refuse me still, and I am not baffled.  But I ask why?  I am not deformed or idiotic.  I would try to make you happy.  A woman is best when she has entirely her own way,—­I would let you have yours.  You would be free to follow your own whims and caprices.  Provided you gave me lawful heirs, I should ask no more of you.  No reasonable man ought to ask more of any reasonable woman.  Life could be made very enjoyable to us both, with a little tact and sense on either side.  I should amuse myself in the world, and so I hope, would you.  We understand modern life and appreciate its conveniences.  The freedom of the matrimonial state is one of those conveniences, of which I am sure we should equally take advantage.”