"I am not--altogether--sure that he is beneath me," she said rather wistfully.
"But you don’t love him?" her uncle insisted, scanning her piercingly.
She bent her head with an instinctive desire to avoid his eyes. "No."
"Ha!" he exclaimed, in the tone of one who has discovered something. "Your mother hinted as much. And you think you’re going to make things better for yourself by marriage with a rank outsider. Is that it? Is that it? Then take my word for it, you’re going to make the biggest mistake of your life. And if you persist in it, I’ve done with you. At least, no, I haven’t done; for I’m going straight to that young man of yours to tell him the sort of bargain he’s going to make."
He paused, for suddenly Maud had drawn herself up very straight and proud. "If you wish to do so, you must," she said, and her pale face was very regal and composed. "But it will not make the smallest difference to either of us. Jake has my promise. I have his."
It was at this point that the door opened again to admit the landlady with a note on a salver.
"Mr. Bolton’s compliments," she said, "and will you be good enough to send back an answer?"
Maud took the note with a glance at her uncle.
"Open it!" he said. "Don’t mind me!" and stumped irately to the bay-window and pulled aside the blind.
Maud opened the note. Her hands were not very steady. The envelope contained a half-sheet of notepaper with a few words scrawled thereupon, and a short length of string.
"Sorry to trouble you," ran the note. "But will you tie a knot in the enclosed to show me the size of your wedding finger? Yours, Jake."
She looked up from the note as her uncle came tramping back. "Is it the young man himself?" he demanded.
"It’s Mr. Bolton, sir," said the landlady.
"Then show him in!" ordered the old man autocratically. "Show him in, and we’ll get it over! No time like the present."
A swift remonstrance rose to Maud’s lips, but she did not utter it. The landlady looked to her for confirmation of the order, but she did not utter a single word.
"Get along!" commanded Uncle Edward. "Or I’ll fetch him in myself!"
A whiff of tobacco-smoke came in through the open door. Maud stood very still, listening. A moment later there came the sound of a pipe being tapped on the heel of a boot, and then the firm, quiet tread of Jake’s feet in the passage.