Page:The wheels of chance -- a bicycling idyll.djvu/154

140 At last he spoke in as persuasive a voice as he could summon. "Take it sensibly, Jessie. Why should we, who have so much in common, quarrel into melodrama? I swear I love you. You are all that is bright and desirable to me. I am stronger than you, older; man to your woman. To find you too—conventional!"

She looked at him over her shoulder, and he noticed with a twinge of delight how her little chin came out beneath the curve of her cheek.

"Man!" she said. "Man to my woman! Do men lie? Would a man use his five and thirty years' experience to outwit a girl of seventeen? Man to my woman indeed ! That surely is the last insult!"

"Your repartee is admirable, Jessie. I should say they do, though—all that and more also when their hearts were set on such a girl as yourself. For God's sake drop this shrewishness ! Why should you be so—difficult to me? Here am I with my reputation, my career, at your feet. Look here, Jessie—on my honour, I will marry you—"

"God forbid," she said, so promptly that she never learnt he had a wife, even then. It occurred to him then for the first time, in the flash of her retort, that she did not know he was married.

"'Tis only a pre-nuptial settlement," he said, following that hint.