Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/43

 [None of us wanted to, I give you my word.]—"Upon my soul, I meant marrying her if she would only ha' taken me. And she did. O Heaven, she did! She has accepted me!" Tick covered his face with his hands and went on like a lunatic. I fancied he d got a touch of the sun, or that the peg-tumbler of port was beginning to work. Then he started off on a fresh tack, while we were staring at one another and wondering what on earth was coming next.

"Do any of you fellows recollect the Club Ball at Mussoorie this year?" Curiously enough not one of us had been up of the Mess; but you may be certain that we knew all about the ball.—[By the way, take us all round and we're the best dancers in India; but that's neither here nor there.]—Someone said, "Yes;" and Tick went on again:—"It happened there! It happened there! I had arranged beforehand that she was to give me four or five dances and all the extras. She knew long before that, I think, that I loved her; and I as good as told her before the dance began that I intended proposing. It was the first extra - there were going to be three that evening—that I had arranged to sit out with her and tell her how I loved her. We had been dancing together a good deal that evening, until she began to complain of a pain in her side, and then we sat out in the verandah."

Tick shovelled his hand through his hair and rolled his eyes about, more like a maniac than ever, and we sat tight and filled up our glasses quietly without saying anything.

"At the end of the last pukka waltz she went into the cloak room, because her slipper-elastic had become slack—I heard her explain that to the man she was dancing with,—and I went out into the verandah to think over what I had got to say. When I turned round I saw her standing at my side; and before I had time to say anything she just slipped her arm through mine and was looking up in my face. 'Well, what is it that you're going to say to me?' said she. And then I spoke—though honestly I was a little bit startled at the way she herself led up to the point, as it were. Lord only knows what I said or what she said. I told her I loved her, and she told me she loved me. Look here! If a man among you laughs, by Jove, I'll brain him with the decanter!"

Tick's face was something awful to look at just then—a dead white, with blue dimples under the nostrils and the corners of the mouth. He looked like a corpse that had been freshly dug up—not too freshly, though. I never saw anything more beastly