On the evening of the day she had seen the vicar, Mr. Hal Tanneur decided upon making a diplomatic offer, so set about with reservations and contingencies, that it was somewhat in the nature of a familiar stock exchange transaction. In other words he set himself the task of securing an option on her hand, with the understanding that in the event of his father’s refusal to endorse the contract, the option was to be secretly renewed for an indefinite period. He did not put the matter in so few words as I, because he was not such a clever juggler of words as I am, but after he had been talking, with innumerable "d’ye see what I mean Alic’s" and "of course you understand’s," she got a dim idea of what he was driving at. She let him go on. "Of course the governor’s got pots of money, and I don’t want to get in his bad books. Just now he’s a bit worried over some Nevada property he’s trying to do a chap out of—in quite a business-like way of course. The other chap—the chap who has the property now has got a big flaw in his title and he doesn’t know it. See? Well, unless he renews his claim and gets some kind of an order from the court, or something of that sort, the governor and the governor’s friends can throw him out, d’ye see what I mean?" "I really don’t see what this is to do with me," said Alicia frankly bored, "you said you wanted to tell me something of the greatest importance, and I really ought to be seeing about mother’s supper." "Wait a bit," he pleaded, "this is where the whole thing comes in: if the governor pulls this deal off, he’ll be as pleased as Punch, and I can say out plump and plain how I feel about you." It was on the tip of her tongue to inform him that "plump and plain" was ludicrously descriptive of himself, but she forbore. Instead she plunged him into a state of embarrassed incoherence by demanding coolly— "Do I understand, Hal, that you have been proposing to me?" She cut short his explanations with a smile. "Please don’t wound my vanity by telling me this is only a tentative offer—anyway I’ll put your mind at rest. Under no circumstances could I marry you: there are thousands of reasons for that decision, but the main one is, that I do not love you, and I cannot imagine anything short of a miracle that would make me love you." She left him speechless. The greater part of the next day he sulked in the garden, but towards the evening he grew cheerful. After all, a woman’s No was not necessarily final. He got most of his ideas from the comic papers.