Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/88

80 "I am told," says Captain Lovelace, "that Mrs. Adair was no older when you married her; you did not then consider her youth a drawback?"

"What Mrs. Adair did is no affair of yours, sir," says papa, fiercely.

"None whatever," says Captain Lovelace, "save that it forms a precedent."

There is a pause, and Alice makes a significant face, to convey to us that the governor's countenance is the reverse of angelic. The fact is, he is in a dilemma. He has had some experience of his daughter's admirers already, and he knows perfectly well that, if Tom is not in love with, and wanting to marry her, it will be Dick or Harry, and that if this young man is sent to the right about, there will be fifty others popping up before him asking the same troublesome question. He also knows that Miss Alice has a spice of his own wilful, perverse temper in her (as, indeed, it would be odd if she had not; I often wonder we are not all demons), and that she is not very likely to prove a meek little fool, who will see all her lovers rapped on the head, and sent about their business, without knowing the reason why; and altogether for once in his life, he is compelled to think instead of to act.

There is some more conversation, and pretty sharp practice, between the two men too; and more than once it seems probable that our expectations will be fulfilled, and the parting guest sped over our listening ranks, but in the end—oh! wonder?—the lover prevails and wrings a most reluctant permission from the governor to pay his addresses to our sister for six months, and if at the end of that time no specks are discovered upon his character, or vice in his ways or words, he shall be considered engaged to Alice for an indefinite period, matrimony appearing dimly in the far horizon. (Papa is a sly old fox, he means to make fools of them both; as