'Father,' she began, 'I've something I must tell you.'
'Eh, what's that ye say?' his hand was on the gas-tap. He dropped it, examining her face curiously.
'Mr. Mynors has asked me to marry him; he asked me last night. We settled he should come up to-night to see you--I can't think why he hasn't. It must be something very unexpected and important, or he'd have come.' She trembled, her heart beat violently; but the words were out, and she thanked God.
'Asked ye to marry him, did he?' The miser gazed at her quizzically out of his small blue eyes.
'Oh! Thou saidst thou wouldst! I reckon it was for thatten as thou must go gadding off to seaside, eh?'
'Father, I never dreamt of such a thing when Suttons asked me to go. I do wish Henry'--the cost of that Christian name!--'had come. He quite meant to come to-night.' She could not help insisting on the propriety of Henry's intentions.
His tone was, at the best, brusque; but she breathed more easily, divining instantly from his manner that he meant to offer no violent objection to the engagement. She knew that only tact was needed now. The miser had, indeed, foreseen the possibility of this marriage for months past, and had long since decided in his own mind that Henry would make a satisfactory son-in-law. Ephraim had no social ambitions--with all his meanness, he was above them; he had nothing but contempt for rank, style, luxury, and 'the theory of what it is to be a lady and a gentleman.' Yet, by a curious contradiction, Henry's smartness of appearance--the smartness of an unrivalled commercial traveller--pleased him. He saw in Henry a young and sedate man of remarkable shrewdness, a man who had saved money, had made money for others, and was now making it for himself; a man who could be trusted absolutely to perform that feat of 'getting on'; a 'safe' and profoundly respectable man, at the same time audacious and imperturbable. He was well aware that Henry had really fallen in love with Anna, but nothing would have convinced him that Anna's money was not the primal cause of Henry's genuine passion for Anna's self.
'You like Henry, don't you, father?' Anna said. It was a failure in the desired tact, for Ephraim had never been known to admit that he liked anyone or anything. Such natures are capable of nothing more positive than toleration.