Hastily he answered her out of his anger for her sake: "It should not have been your affair to meet them at all."
He saw the scarlet flush sweep over her face and leave it deathly white, and instantly he perceived how horribly he had blundered.
"I'm sorry to have been interfering," she answered stiffly, "but, after all, it is not a matter that need trouble you." And on the words she turned to depart again. "Good-day, Captain Tremayne."
"Ah, wait!" He flung himself between her and the door. "We must understand each other, Miss Armytage."
"I think we do, Captain Tremayne," she answered, fire dancing in her eyes. And she added: "You are detaining me."
"Intentionally." He was calm again; and he was masterful for the first time in all his dealings with her. "We are very far from any understanding. Indeed, we are overhead in a misunderstanding already. You misconstrue my words. I am very angry with you. I do not think that in all my life I have ever been so angry with anybody. But you are not to mistake the source of my anger. I am angry with you for the great wrong you have done yourself."
"That should not be your affair," she answered him, thus flinging back the offending phrase.
"But it is. I make it mine," he insisted.
"Then I do not give you the right. Please let me pass." She looked him steadily in the face, and her voice was calm to coldness. Only the heave of her bosom betrayed the agitation under which she was labouring.
"Whether you give me the right or not, I intend to take it," he insisted.
"You are very rude," she reproved him.
He laughed. "Even at the risk of being rude, then. I must make myself clear to you. I would suffer anything sooner than leave you under any misapprehension of the grounds upon which I should have preferred to face a firing party rather than have been rescued at the sacrifice of your good name."
"I hope," she said, with faint but cutting irony, "you do not intend to offer me the reparation of marriage."
It took his breath away for a moment. It was a solution that in his confused and irate state of mind he had never even paused to consider. Yet now that it was put to him in this scornfully reproachful manner he perceived not only that it was the only possible course, but also that on that very account it might be considered by her impossible.
Her testiness was suddenly plain to him. She feared that he was come to her with an offer of marriage out of a sense of duty, as an amende, to correct the false position into which, for his sake, she had placed herself. And he himself by his blundering phrase had given colour to that hideous fear of hers.
He considered a moment whilst he stood there meeting her defiant glance. Never had she been more desirable in his eyes; and hopeless as his love for her had always seemed, never had it been in such danger of hopelessness as at this present moment, unless he proceeded here with the utmost care. And so Ned Tremayne became subtle for the first time in his honest, straightforward, soldierly life. "No," he answered boldly, "I do not intend it."
"I am glad that you spare me that," she answered him, yet her pallor seemed to deepen under his glance.
"And that," he continued, "is the source of all my anger, against you, against myself, and against circumstances. If I had deemed myself remotely worthy of you," he continued, "I should have asked you weeks ago to be my wife. Oh, wait, and hear me out. I have more than once been upon the point of doing so—the last time was that night on the balcony at Count Redondo's. I would have spoken then; I would have taken my courage in my hands, confessed my unworthiness and my love. But I was restrained because, although I might confess, there was nothing I could ask. I am a poor man, Sylvia, you are the daughter of a wealthy one; men speak of you as an heiress. To ask you to marry me—" He broke off. "You realise that I could not; that I should have been deemed a fortune-hunter, not only by the world, which matters nothing, but perhaps by yourself, who matter everything. I—I—" he faltered, fumbling for words to express thoughts of an overwhelming intricacy. "It was not perhaps that so much as the thought that, if my suit should come to prosper, men would say you had thrown yourself away on a fortune-hunter. To myself I should have accounted the reproach well earned, but it seemed to me that it must contain something slighting to you, and to shield you from all slights must be the first concern of my deep worship for you. That," he ended fiercely, "is why I am so angry, so desperate at the slight you have put upon yourself for my sake—for me, who would have sacrificed life and honour and everything I hold of any account, to keep you up there, enthroned not only in my own eyes, but in the eyes of every man."
He paused, and looked at her and she at him. She was still very white, and one of her long, slender hands was pressed to her bosom as if to contain and repress tumult. But her eyes were smiling, and yet it was a smile he could not read; it was compassionate, wistful, and yet tinged, it seemed to him, with mockery.
"I suppose," he said, "it would be expected of me in the circumstances to seek words in which to thank you for what you have done. But I have no such words. I am not grateful. How could I be grateful? You have destroyed the thing that I most valued in this world."
"What have I destroyed?" she asked him.
"Your own good name; the respect that was your due from all men."
"Yet if I retain your own?"
"What is that worth?" he asked almost resentfully.
"Perhaps more than all the rest." She took a step forward and set her hand upon his arm. There was no mistaking now her smile. It was all tenderness, and her eyes were shining. "Ned, there is only one thing to be done."
He looked down at her who was only a little less tall than himself, and the colour faded from his own face now.
"You haven't understood me after all," he said. "I was afraid you would not. I have no clear gift of words, and if I had, I am trying to say something that would overtax any gift."
"On the contrary, Ned, I understand you perfectly. I don't think I have ever understood you until now. Certainly never until now could I be sure of what I hoped."
"Of what you hoped?" His voice sank as if in awe. "What?" he asked.
She looked away, and her persisting, yet ever-changing smile grew slightly arch.
"You do not then intend to ask me to marry you?" she said.
"How could I?" It was an explosion almost of anger. "You yourself suggested that it would be an insult; and so it would. It is to take advantage of the position into which your foolish generosity has betrayed you. Oh!" he clenched his fists and shook them a moment at his sides.
"Very well," she said. "In that case I must ask you to marry me."
"You?" He was thunderstruck.
"What alternative do you leave me? You say that I have destroyed my good name. You must provide me with a new one. At all costs I must become an honest woman. Isn't that the phrase?"
"Don't!" he cried, and pain quivered in his voice. "Don't jest upon it."
"My dear," she said, and now she held out both hands to him, "why trouble yourself with things of no account, when the only thing that matters to us is within our grasp? We love each other, and—"
Her glance fell away, her lip trembled, and her smile at last took flight. He caught her hands, holding them in a grip that hurt her; he bent his head, and his eyes sought her own, but sought in vain.
"Have you considered—" he was beginning, when she interrupted him. Her face flushed upward, surrendering to that questing glance of his, and its expression was now between tears and laughter.
"You will be for ever considering, Ned. You consider too much, where the issues are plain and simple. For the last time—will you marry me?"
The subtlety he had employed had been greater than he knew, and it had achieved something beyond his utmost hopes.