ook her--one can
hardly say round the waist, for she hasn't got one--he took her round
the last hook-and-eye of her dress, and, by way of offering her a
refuge from the indignity of being sent to school at her age, made her a
proposal of marriage in so many words.

"If I could have killed them both at that moment by lifting up my little
finger, I have not the least doubt I should have lifted it. As things
were, I only waited to see what Miss Milroy would do.

"She appeared to think it necessary--feeling, I suppose, that she had
met him without her father's knowledge, and not forgetting that I
had had the start of her as the favored object of Mr. Armadale's good
opinion--to assert herself by an explosion of virtuous indignation. She
wondered how he could think of such a thing after his conduct with Miss
Gwilt, and after her father had forbidden him the house! Did he want to
make her feel how inexcusably she had forgotten what was due to herself?
Was it worthy of a gentleman to propose what he knew as well as she did
was impossible? and so on, and so on. Any man with brains in his head
would have known what all this rodomontade really meant. Armadale took
it so seriously that he actually attempted to justify himself.

"He declared, in his headlong, blundering way, that he was quite in
earnest; he and her father might make it up and be friends again; and,
if the major persisted in treating him as a stranger, young ladies and
gentlemen in their situation had made runaway marriages before now, and
fathers and mothers who wouldn't forgive them before had forgiven them
afterward. Such outrageously straightforward love-making as this left
Miss Milroy, of course, but two alternatives--to confess that she
had been saying No when she meant Yes, or to take refuge in another
explosion. She was hypocrite enough to prefer another explosion. 'How
dare you, Mr. Armadale? Go away directly! It's inconsiderate, it's
heartless, it's perfectly disgraceful to say such things to me!' and so
on, and so on. It seems incredible, but it is not the less true, that
he was positively fool enough to take her at her word. He begged her
pardon, and went away like a child that is put in the corner--the most
contemptible object in the form of man that eyes ever looked on!

"She waited, after he had gone, to compose herself, and I waited behind
the trees to see how she would succeed. Her eyes wandered round slyly
to the path by which he had left her. Sh