“I don’t want to m-marry any of you, though,” he said.
George squeezed his shoulder again before removing his hand.
“I would say no even if you asked,” he said.
***
When people spoke of crying themselves to sleep, Agnes thought at some time around two o’ clock the next morning, they surely lied. Her nose was so blocked that she had to breathe through her mouth. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her lips were swollen and dry and chapped. She was a mess. The last thing she could do was sleep.
And she was sick of herself.
Either say yes to that horrid man, she thought as she gazed at her image in the dressing table mirror by the flickering light of a single candle—she looked like something hovering above a graveyard on All Hallows’ Eve. Either say yes—if, that was, he came tomorrow and asked again, which was far from certain—or say no.
It sounded like a simple choice.
Whaton earthwas she doing, weeping her heart out for such a muddle-headedrake? But rakes did not blurt out marriage proposals to faded widows—well, fading, anyway. And rakes did not walk around in the afternoon with pale complexions and shadowed eyes from lack of sleep. Oh! Oh, yes, perhaps they did. Butthatwas not the reason for his pallor today—yesterday. Neither was anxiety over a marriage proposal about to be made, its outcome uncertain.
He had no more intended to propose to her than she had thought to climb the nearest tree.
Why was she crying? And why could she not sleep? She sniffed without any satisfactory result. There was only one remedy—for both her sleeplessness and her blocked nose. A cup of tea would soothe her stomach and clear her nasal passages. It would comfort her. It would restore her to herself.
She would beverysurprised ifhewas lying awake, shedding tears overher.
What had kept him awake last night, then, and perhaps the night before? Not her, certainly. She felt a twinge of jealousy for whatever orwhoeverit was, and then gazed at her image with self-loathing.
It was not easy to get the fire going again in the kitchen. It was even harder to do it and fill the kettle and get down a cup and saucer noiselessly. She had shut the door firmly behind her, but inevitably it opened just when she had accomplished all the tasks that would create the most sound.
Dora, a warm shawl wrapped about her shoulders over her nightgown, stepped inside and closed the door. Of course it was Dora. An earthquake would not wake Mrs. Henry once she was asleep.
“I could not sleep,” Agnes explained as she busied herself over the fire, as though the kettle needed skilled coaxing in order to boil. “I tried not to wake you.”
“It is not frustration over your painting that has put you out of sorts lately, is it?” Dora asked, reaching up into the cupboard for another cup and saucer and checking the teapot to see whether Agnes had put in the tea leaves yet.
Agnes sniffed and discovered that she could breathe again through one nostril—just.
“He asked me to marry him,” she said. “Or, rather, he informed me that I had better.”
Dora did not askwho.
“I have always thought,” she said instead, sounding almost wistful, “that if anyone ever askedmeto marry him, I would weep tears of joy. But yours are not joyful, are they?”
“He did not mean it, Dora.”
“Then he is a very foolish young man,” Dora said, “for you might have said yes. I assume you did not?”
“How could I,” Agnes asked, “when I knew he did not mean it?”
The kettle was starting to boil. Dora made the tea and left it to steep in the pot.
“But you would have accepted if he had?” she asked. “Do youknowhim, Agnes, beyond dancing with him at the harvest ball and going off with him for twenty minutes or so on the evening of the concert and walking home with him today?”
Dora had noticed her absence, then, on that evening when she had played? Who else had? Everyone, she supposed.
“He came upon me one morning when I went into the park to paint the daffodils,” Agnes explained. “That was before the concert. And he found me there again one other day.”
She poured the tea. She did not add that he had kissed her. Dora would be shocked. Besides...
“A romantic setting,” Dora said. “Have you conceived atendrefor him, Agnes? But of course you have, or you would not be down here at this ungodly hour with your face looking the way it does.”
