"The Arab lady and the faithful gee-gee," she said. "I know The Witch doesn't care, but I can't help loving her.... Are you properly impressed with my grief?"
There was that in Burleson's eyes that sobered her; she instinctively laid her hand on the gate, looking at him with a face which had suddenly grown colorless and expressionless.
"Miss Elliott," he said, "will you marry me?"
The tingling silence lengthened, broken at intervals by the dull stamping of the horses.
After a moment she moved leisurely past him, bending her head as she entered the yard, and closing the gate slowly behind her. Then she halted, one gloved hand resting on the closed gate, and looked at him again.
There is an awkwardness in men that women like; there is a _gaucherie_ that women detest. She gazed silently at this man, considering him with a serenity that stunned him speechless.
Yet all the while her brain was one vast confusion, and the tumult of her own heart held her dumb. Even the man himself appeared as a blurred vision; echoes of lost voices dinned in her ears--the voices of children--of a child whom she had known when she wore muslin frocks to her knees--a boy who might once have been this man before her--this tall, sunburned young man, awkward, insistent, artless--oh, entirely without art in a wooing which alternately exasperated and thrilled her. And now his awkwardness had shattered the magic of the dream and left her staring at reality--without warning, without the courtesy of a "_garde à vous!_"
And his answer? He was waiting for his answer. But men are not gods to demand!--not highwaymen to bar the way with a "Stand and deliver!" And an answer is a precious thing--a gem of untold value. It was hers to give, hers to withhold, hers to defend.
"You will call on us to say good-bye this evening?" she asked, steadying her voice.
A deep color stung his face; he bowed, standing stiff and silent until she had passed through the open door of the veranda. Then, half blind with his misery, he mounted, wheeled, and galloped away, The Witch clattering stolidly at his stirrup.
Already the primrose light lay over hill and valley; already the delicate purple net of night had snared forest and marsh; and the wild ducks were stringing across the lakes, and the herons had gone to the forest, and plover answered plover from swamp to swamp, plaintive, querulous, in endless reiteration--"Lost! lost! she's lost--she's lost--she's lost!"