e had chosen
finally to torment him with. "Are you ready to follow up by a definite
promise your implied assurance that I've a remedy?"

"A definite promise?" Miriam benignly gazed--it was the perfection of
indirectness. "I don't 'imply' that you've a remedy. I declare it on the
house-tops. That delightful girl--"

"I'm not talking of any delightful girl but you!" he broke in with a
voice that, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Rooth's ears in the
garden with affright. "I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted
of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said ten
minutes ago."

"Ah I've said so many things! One has to do that to get rid of you. You
rather hurt my hand," she added--and jerked it away in a manner showing
that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself.

"As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my
profession?" Peter pursued. "If I break with everything, my prospects,
my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the
service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up
instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn
how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie--if after
further reflexion I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I
your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your
precious hand?"

"I don't think you've any right to put the question to me now," she
returned with a promptitude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut
form his solemn speech had given--there was a charm in the sound of
it--to each item of his enumeration. "The case is so very contingent, so
dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflexion. While you
really reserve everything you ask me to commit myself. If it's a
question of further reflexion why did you drag me up here? And then,"
she added, "I'm so far from wishing you to take any such monstrous
step."

"Monstrous you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime."

"Sublime if it's done with spontaneity, with passion; ridiculous if it's
done 'after further reflexion.' As you said, perfectly, a while ago, it
isn't a thing to reason about."

"Ah what a help you'd be to me in diplomacy!" Peter yearningly cried.
"Will you give me a year to consider?"

"Would you trust _me_ for a year?"

"Why not, if I'm ready to trust you for life?"

"Oh I shouldn't be free then, worse luck. And how