Had she proposed in serious earnestness to murder him Everard could not have been more startled, or stared at her more fixedly than he did, as if to see what manner of girl this was, asking him to marry her as coolly and in as matter-of-fact a way as she would have asked the most ordinary favor. Was she crazy? Had the trouble about the will actually affected her brain! He thought so, and said to her very gently, as he would have spoken to a child or a lunatic: “You are talking wildly, Rossie. You do not understand what you are saying. You are tired and excited. You must rest, and never on any account let any one know what you have said to me.” “I do know what I am saying, and I am neither tired nor excited,” Rossie answered. “Lawyer Russell said that was the only way you could use the money before I was twenty-one.” “And did he send you here to say that to me?” Everard asked, and she replied: “No, he only suggested it as a means, because I would have him think of something. I came myself.” He saw she was in earnest; saw, too, that she did not at all comprehend what she was doing, or the position in which she was placing herself if it should be known. In her utter simplicity and lack of worldly wisdom, she might talk of this thing to others and put herself in a wrong light before the world, and however painful the task, he must enlighten her. “Rossie,” he began, “you do not at all know what you have done, or how the act might be construed, by women, especially, if they knew it. Girls do not usually ask men to marry them; they wait to be asked.” Slowly, as the shadow of some gigantic mountain creeps across the valley, there was dawning on Rossie’s mind a perception of the construction which might be put upon her words, and the blood-red flame suffused her face and neck, and spread to her finger-tips, as she said, vehemently: “You mistake me, Mr. Everard, I did not mean it as you might marry Miss Beatrice, or somebody you loved. I did not mean anything except a way out. I was not going to live here at all; only marry you so you could have the money, and then I go away and do for myself. That’s what I meant. You know I do not love you in a marrying way, and that I’m not the brazen-faced thing to tell you so if I did. If I thought you could believe that of me, I should drop dead at your feet, and I almost wish that I could now, for very shame of what I have done.” As she talked there had come to Rossie more and more the great impropriety and seeming immodesty of what, in all innocence of purpose she had done, and the knowledge almost crushed her to the earth, making her cover her burning face with her hands, and transforming her at once from a child into a woman, with all a sensitive woman’s power to feel and suffer. She did not wait for him to speak, but went on rapidly: