Avery’s eyes fell before his pitiless stare.  She began with fingers that trembled to pluck the primroses that grew in a large tuft close to her, saying no word.

“Well?” said Sir Beverley, with growing impatience.

She kept her eyes lowered, for she felt she could not meet his look as she made reluctant answer.  “No, it is not either.  In fact, if I were a girl—­I had not been married before—­I think I should say Yes.  But—­but—­” she paused, searching for words, striving to restrain a rising agitation, “as it is, I don’t think it would be quite fair to him.  I don’t know if I could make him happy.  I am not young enough, fresh enough, gay enough.  I can’t offer him a girl’s first love, and that is what he ought to have.  I so want him to have the best.  I so want him to be happy.”

The words were out with a rush, almost before she was aware of uttering them, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears, tears that caught her off her guard, so that she had neither time nor strength to check them.  She turned quickly from him, fighting for self-control.

Sir Beverley uttered a grunt that might have denoted either surprise or disgust, and there followed a silence that she found peculiarly difficult to bear.

“So,” he said at last, in a tone that was strictly devoid of feeling, “you care for him too much to marry him?  Is that it?”

It sounded preposterous, but she was still too near tears for any sense of humour to penetrate her distress.  She felt as if he had remorselessly wrested from her and dragged to light a treasure upon which she herself had scarcely dared to look.  She continued feverishly to pluck the pale flowers that grew all about them, her eyes fixed upon her task.

With a growling effort, Sir Beverley raised himself, thrust forward a quivering hand and gripped hers.

Startled, she turned towards him, meeting not hostility but a certain grim kindliness in the hard old eyes.

“Will you honour me with your attention for a moment?” he asked, with ironical courtesy.

“I am attending,” she answered meekly.

“Then,” he said, dropping all pretence at courtesy without further ceremony, “permit me to say that if you don’t marry my grandson, you’ll be a bigger fool than I take you for.  And in my opinion, a sober-minded woman like you who will see to his comfort and be faithful to him is more likely to make him happy than any of your headlong, flighty girls.”

He stopped; but he did not relinquish his hold upon her.  There was to Avery something oddly pathetic in the close grasp of those unsteady fingers.  It was as if they made an appeal which he would have scorned to utter.

“You really wish me to marry him?” she said.

He snarled at her like a surly dog.  “Wish it?  I!  Good Heavens above, if I had my way I’d never let him marry at all!  But unfortunately circumstances demand it; and the boy himself—­the boy himself, well—­” his voice softened imperceptibly, rasped on a note of tenderness, “he wants looking after; he’s young, you know.  He’ll be all alone very soon, and—­it isn’t considered good for a man to live alone—­not a young man anyway.”