“I say,” he murmured with timidity--“I say, dear, I have wanted to ask you ever since--I suppose--I mean, of course, I understand, now you are free you will want me to--wish me to--I mean we shall have to get married, shan’t we, when the year’s out?” When these words had escaped him he was sensible that they were not complimentary, that they were not at all what he ought to have said, and a vague sensation of fright stole over him and he felt himself turn pale. Into the blue eyes of Mouse that terrible lightning flashed which had withered up his courage very often as flame licks up dry grass. Then her sense of humor was stronger than her sense of offence; she took her cigarette out of her mouth and laughed with a genuine peal of musical laughter which was not affected. He stared at her, relieved, but in his turn offended. After all, he thought, it was not every man who would have ridden so straight up to the fence of duty and taken it so gallantly. “My dear Harry,” she said, rather slightingly, when her mirth had subsided, “I have had to listen to many declarations in my time, but--but I never had one so eloquent, so delicate, so opportune as yours. Pray will you tell me why I should be supposed to want to marry you, as you chivalrously express it?” “It’s usual,” he answered sulkily, not daring to express the astonishment with which her tone and manner filled him. “What is usual?” she asked, looking straight at him with serene imperturbable coolness and entire refusal to meet him half way by any kind of comprehension. “Well, it _is_, you know that,” he replied, looking down on the carpet. “Usual for a woman to marry again seven weeks after her husband’s death? I never heard so. I believe there is a country where a widow does marry all her husband’s brothers one after another, as fast as she can, but that country is not England.” She put her cigarette back into her mouth again. He looked at her apprehensively and shyly as Jack did very often from under his long lashes. He was puzzled and he was humiliated. He had brought himself up with a rush to do what he thought honor and all the rest of it required of him, and his self-sacrifice was not even appreciated but derided. “I thought, of course, you’d desire it on account of the children,” he said stupidly, insanely, for he should have known that truths like this cannot be told to women with any possibility of pardon to the teller of them. She looked at him with an admirably imitated astonishment. “For the children? For Cocky’s children? I am really unable to guess why.” “Oh, damnation!” The rude word escaped him despite himself; he rose and walked to and fro across the room trying to keep down the very unreasonable passion which burned within him. “Pray sit down--or go out,” said Mouse calmly, and she lighted a fresh cigarette at the little silver lighter.