“I am afraid not.”

“But why do you except me?” asked Dick.  “Surely she is not engaged.  I know you would tell me at once if that were so.”

“It is not so,” said Mrs. Easterfield.

“Then I shall take my chances.  With all this serenading and love-making going on around me and around the woman I love with all my heart.  I can not stand and wait until I am told my time has come.  The intensity and the ardor of my feelings for her give me the right to speak to her.  Unless I know that some one else has stepped in before me and taken the place I crave, I have decided to speak to her just as soon as I can.  But I thought it was due to you to come first and tell you.”

“Mr. Lancaster,” said Mrs. Easterfield, speaking very quietly, “if you decide to go to Miss Asher and ask her to marry you, I know you will do it, for I believe you are a man who keeps his word to himself, but I assure you that if you do it you will never marry her.  So you really need not bother yourself about going to her; you can simply decide to do it, and that will be quite sufficient; and you can stay here and hold these long-stemmed dahlias for me as I cut them.”

A troubled wistfulness showed itself upon the young man’s face.  “You speak so confidently,” he said, “that I almost feel I ought to believe you.  Why do you tell me that I am the only one of her suitors who would certainly be rejected if he offered himself?”

Mrs. Easterfield dropped the long-stemmed dahlias she had been holding; and, turning her eyes full upon Lancaster, she said, “Because you are the only one of them toward whom she has no predilections whatever.  More than that, you are the only one toward whom she has a positive objection.  You are the only one who is an intimate friend of her uncle, and who would be likely, by means of that intimate friendship, to bring her into connection with the woman she hates, as well as with a relative she despises on account of his intended marriage with that woman.”

“All that should not count at all,” cried Dick.  “In such a matter as this I have nothing to do with Captain Asher!  I stand for myself and speak for myself.  What is his intended wife to me?  Or what should she be to her?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Easterfield, “all that would not count at all if Olive Asher loved you.  But you see she doesn’t.  I have had it from her own lips that her uncle’s intended marriage is, and must always be, an effectual barrier between you and her.”

“What” cried Dick.  “Have you spoken to her of me?  And in that way?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Easterfield, “I have.  I did not intend to tell you, but you have forced me to do it.  You see, she is a young woman of extraordinary good sense.  She believes she ought to marry, and she is going to try to make the very best marriage that she possibly can.  She has suitors who have very strong claims upon her consideration—­I am not going to tell you those claims, but I know them.  Now, you have no claim—­special claim, I mean—­but for all this, I believe, as I have told you before, that you are the man she ought to marry, and I have been doing everything I can to make her cease considering them, and to consider you.  And this is the way she came to give me her reasons for not considering you at all.  Now the state of the case is plain before you.”