"I can't tell you anything now," she said rather breathlessly. "I did try--a little while ago, and you wouldn't listen. You--you _must_ give me a few days--you must! If you don't, I'll say 'no' now--at once!" her voice rising excitedly.
She was overwrought, strung up to such a pitch that she hardly knew what she was saying. She had been through a good deal in the last hour or two and Trenby realised it. Suddenly that grim determination of his to force her promise, to bind her his here and now, yielded to an overwhelming flood of tenderness.
"It shall be as you wish, Nan," he said very gently. "I know I'm asking everything of you, and that you're frightened and upset to-day. I ought not to have spoken. And--and I'm a lot older than you."
"Oh, it isn't that," replied Nan hastily, fearing he might be feeling sore over the disparity in their respective ages. She did not want him to be hurt about things that would never have counted at all had she loved him.
"Well, if I wait till Monday--that's four days--will that do?" he asked.
"Thank you"--very simply. He lifted her hands to his lips. "And remember," he added desperately, "that I love you, Nan--you're my whole world."
He paced the short length of the room and back, and when he came to her side again, every trace of emotion was wiped out of his face.
"Now I'm going to take you back home. Mrs. Denman"--smiling faintly--"says she'll put 'an 'assock' in the car for your damaged leg to rest on, so with rugs and that coat you were so averse to bringing I think you'll be all right."
He went to the table and poured out something in a glass.
"Drink that," he said, holding it towards her. "It'll warm you up."
Nan sniffed at the liquid in the glass and tendered it back to him with a grimace.
"It's brandy," she said. "I hate the stuff."
"You'll drink it, though, won't you?"--persuasively.
"No," shaking her head. "I can't bear the taste of it."
"But it's good for you." He stood in front of her, glass in hand. "Come, Nan, don't be foolish. You need something before we start. Drink it up."
He held it to her lips, and Nan, too proud to struggle or resist like a child, swallowed the obnoxious stuff. As Trenby drove her home she had time to reflect upon the fact that if she married him there would be many a contest of wills between them. He roused a sense of rebellion in her, and he was unmistakably a man who meant to be obeyed.