She was wide awake now, with every faculty alert, and the hot blood was staining her face, as she sat up erect and looked at him wonderingly. She had half expected that something of this sort might happen sometime, but not so soon. Herbert seemed more like a lover than a friend, and she certainly cared more for him than for anyone she had ever met, if indeed, she did not already love him. Still, it was very sudden, being roused from a sound sleep with an offer of marriage at one o’clock in the morning, and, besides that, a thought of Fred Lansing crossed her mind unpleasantly, and the light faded a little from her eyes, which drooped under Herbert’s ardent gaze. “Asked me to be your wife?” she said at last. “Oh, no, you can’t mean it. I am too young, not quite seventeen; and your father would not like it. He looks upon us as dirt, I know, and has said mean things of my father, and made insinuations worse than lies, which can be met and contradicted.” She was growing warm in her defence of her father, and as her warmth increased so did Herbert’s. “I don’t care for a hundred fathers when you are in the scale,” he said. “I know he has acted mean at times, but after yesterday he will do better, and if he don’t, I want _you_ and am going to have you!” Then very rapidly he repeated in substance and with some additions what he had said to her when she was asleep. She was listening attentively, and managing to get a tolerably clear idea of his meaning and wishes, although they were somewhat confusing. She was to promise to marry him as soon as he was graduated, when they would go abroad for a year or more, and see everything there was to see in the Old World. In the meantime she was to persuade her father to send her to some finishing school, either in Boston or New York, where she would be rooted and grounded in everything his wife ought to know of the society into which she would be introduced. He did not say this in so many words, but that was what he meant, and he went on to say that the engagement must be kept a secret, partly because his father would make it unpleasant for him and for her if he knew it, and partly because if either he or she changed her or his mind, it would be better not to have a prior engagement known; not that he could change—that was impossible; and it was equally impossible that she could; but it was well to guard against contingencies. He further intimated that during the years of their engagement she was to receive but little attention from the other sex, but keep herself wholly for him. Just what he was to do in that respect was not quite plain, and it struck Louie as a kind of one-sided affair. A secret engagement did not commend itself to her, and she said so at once, and that she did not like the way Herbert talked, as if she were not quite his equal and must be polished to become so.