Stolen honey

Chapter I Langrishe Proposes

If Damer Langrishe had used an ordinary instead of a fountain pen probably the letter would never have got itself written.

The pauses necessary for the dipping of pen-point in ink might have crystallized his momentary irresolutions into definite indecision. As it was, the easy unchecked flow led him on almost imperceptibly to the abrupt char¬ acteristic signature that set seal to the most important document of his life.

Outside, the fierce heat of the Indian summer sun blazed and beat upon the ground with a still intensity. Inside, in the bare, whitewashed room which he called his study, the hot air was disturbed by the creaking waft of a punkah, which swayed to a pause just as Langrishe drew a firm line beneath his signature.

Scantily clad though he was, sweat poured down his forehead in huge drops. He looked up at the still punkahfrill, and shouted an order in Hindustani. The punkah jerked convulsively on again, steadying by degrees to an even rhythm.

Langrishe mopped his face with a rueful grin.

“It's warm work, proposing by letter/’ he said to him¬ self. “If I could only see the girl face to face I might

i be able to put things in a more attractive light. A letter’s so damn bald. You never know how the other person may read it. Still, it’s a business proposition more or less. What else could it be, after all? A widower of forty-two—an ugly devil at that—asking a girl of twenty-eight to marry him, a girl he hasn’t seen or thought of for at least ten years! Hang it all, I can’t send the letter! I won’t!”

He drew the sheet of paper towards him, held it for a moment as if he were going to tear it across, hesitated, dropped it, then pushed it a little away from him.

"I’ll smoke on it first,” he said, taking a cigar from a cedar-lined box at his elbow. "I think the occasion warrants a Corona.”

The flare of the match sent a sharp spurt of orange into the hot dusk of the room. As he cupped it in his strong, sunburnt hands to avoid the draught of the punkah, its light flamed with odd effect on his face, accentuating the rather hard lines of mouth and chin, and evoking queer little sparks from the light-blue eyes that peered from beneath tangled, bushy brows. Reddish hair, now subdued from its earlier flamboyance, grew close to a well-shaped head, and a clean-cut nose with sensitive nostrils contradicted the warring jut of the chin.

Taken altogether, it was a strong face and not un¬ attractive. The eyes, which bore the unmistakable look of one who has gazed towards far horizons across great spaces, could soften to tenderness beneath their thick sandy lashes as readily as they could blaze to a sudden hot anger, as evanescent as it was fierce. The sight of children or young creatures evoked the former, cruelty or injustice in any form, the latter.

Women liked Darner Langrishe, although he was es¬ sentially a man’s rather than a woman’s man. The six

LANGRISHE PROPOSES years of his widowerhood had left him unsolaced by the easy consolations which feminine India had so willingly proffered.

Truth to tell, he had enjoyed his work and his sport all the more for being untrammelled. He had been blessedly free from women, their complexities, their sub¬ tleties, save for a vague undisturbing little daughter at school in England. He had had no desire to replace Helena, the bride of a boyish infatuation, the wife of twelve courteously bored years, until now, when he was faced by the prospect of having a grown-up daughter to look after—a prospect which seemed to have leaped into his pleasant, work-filled life with an appalling sud¬ denness.

‘‘What else am I to do when Dido declares that she won’t stay at school any longer?” he mused, his face softening. “This is no place for a girl alone, and I don’t want any of the women out here to look after her. I wouldn’t trust one of them with my little girl. She’d jib at anything in the nature of a governess or companion, I suppose. Well, she can’t turn up her nose at a step¬ mother. Someone in a definite position of authority. Someone not so very much older than herself. Someone whom I can trust.”

He emphasized the word with a puff of blue cigarsmoke, quite unaware of the futility of the statements which he postulated so confidently out of his pathetic ignorance of modern girlhood.

“Whom could I trust if not one of Lucius Carey’s daughters ?” he went on, touching the fateful letter almost carelessly. “I know that they are straight, well-bred, well-brought-up girls. My cousin Lucius may be a bit of a fool, but he’s a gentleman, and Janet, his wife, has a head on her plump shoulders.”

He pulled the letter towards him, and fingered it irresolutely.

“Shall I risk it? All marriage is a risk, if it comes to that. The hottest love-matches smoulder quickest to ashes/’ He checked a sigh, thinking of his own, whose leaping flames had sunk so suddenly to a barely per¬ ceptible warmth. “Fve always been rather a believer in the French matrimonial system, which seems to work admirably. It’s much the same as that practised by the Irish peasantry, and everyone knows that they are the most virtuous race in Europe. Why is it? It’s be¬ cause they base their married life on a sense of duty rather than on any wild, unbalanced passion. I think it stands to reason that if a decent man and woman, starting on a basis of mutual esteem and respect, agree to marry each other, and to do their duty by each other to the best of their ability, they have a better chance of happiness than if they rushed into matrimony blinded by the urgency of mere physical attraction. Judging by the last letter I had from poor Lucius, his affairs are in a bad way. He’ll be glad to get one of the girls off his hands. Five of them, by Gad! and all unmarried. Pamela’s getting on, too. Twenty-eight. A sensible age. She’s had her fling by this—an innocent enough young fling, I’ll swear—and should be ready to settle down. She was a sweet slip of a thing that summer poor Helena and I spent in Ireland ten years ago. Dido took to her then, I remember. What a weed the brat was, all eyes and legs and peaked, white face^—a typical An¬ glo-Indian child! I wonder what she’s like now? It’s hard to realize that she’s grown-up. By Gad! it’s five whole years since I’ve seen her. Five years!”

Darner Langrishe almost let his cigar go out as he

LANGRISHE PROPOSES tried to peer across the gulf which suddenly gaped in front of him.

Five years since he had seen his daughter, Dido. Five of the most important years in her life; years of the ripening and nourishing of the green bud of childhood to the opening blossom of womanhood; years of untold possibilities; years which would influence the girl's whole future; years in which absence might have separated them irrevocably.

Langrishe, though not over prone to analysis, frowned at the thought, then shook his head meditatively.

“No, I’m taking no risks," he said to himself. “I know nothing about girls. I must have someone who will help me to understand the child. If she comes at all, Pam must come out and marry me before Dido ar¬ rives. She must be here, established, in her rightful place as mistress, before my little monsoon, as I used to call her, is on us. I’ll take no risks."

With slightly reinforced cheerfulness, he drew the let¬ ter towards him once more, folded it and put it into an envelope, which he addressed to “Miss Pamela Carey, Carrigrennan, Moviddy, Co. Cork, Ireland"; thus un¬ wittingly taking one of the biggest risks that mortal man may venture; thus unimaginatively hazarding the wild¬ est leap into the unfathomed and unknown.

Then, with another shout at the flagging punkahcoolie, and thinking himself a model of wise precaution, Langrishe drew a fresh sheet of paper towards him, and began to write a covering letter to the father of the girl he proposed to marry, leaving it to him as to whether he would deliver his offer of marriage or not.

Once more the fountain pen did its appointed work. The letter was finished, folded, put, with its enclosure, into a large envelope, and sealed with the Langrishe crest —a lion rampant, with the motto “Vis virtute nascitur,” —a motto which all the Langrishes secretly but honestly tried to translate into action. Certainly what strength Darner of that ilk possessed sprang from his own innate qualities, for of this world's goods he owned but what he had earned for himself.

He touched the red seal with a questioning forefinger.

“Strength is bom of virtue," he murmured. “Pamela is sure to be a good girl, and that’s what matters most. Lucius Carey’s daughter ought to have a sense of duty. He’s the man to inculcate that! Lord, how priggish and old-fashioned it all sounds in these days of selfdetermination and psyco-analysis! But’’—mused Darner Langrishe, with an air of one who, having discovered a profound truth, utters it in one eloquent and original phrase—“goodness is to a woman what perfume is to a flower. Beauty is nothing without it.’’

He clapped his hands to summon a servant, desirous of making his decision irrevocable. In spite of his dic¬ tum about goodness and beauty, his mind dwelt pleasur¬ ably on a swift vision of the girl Pamela, tall and slim and blue-eyed.

The bearer entered, dignified in his white robe, which showed snowy-cool against the dingier wall.

“Huzoor?’’ he queried, softly guttural.

“Have this posted, Naryan.’’ Langrishe held out the momentous letter.

“Yes, Huzoor.”

“And, Naryan?”

“Huzoor?”

“Do you know what’s wrong with the world to-day?”

“It is not for the sahib’s servant to say.”

“It can be put in a nutshell, Naryan. The world has

LANGRISHE PROPOSES mislaid its sense of duty. That’s what has caused all the trouble.”

Naryan salaamed profoundly.

“Without a doubt the words of the sahib are words of wisdom. Yet that which is but mislaid may be found again, Huzoor, if it be the will of God.”

His gentle optimism touched and pricked his master. As his white robe glimmered, to disappear behind the grass curtain that did duty for a door, Langrishe, seized by his first real misgiving, felt a sudden desire to call him back. Then that unacknowledged but immanent sense of fatalism, which broods like some unseen, puis¬ sant presence over the East, laid a restraining finger on him.

“What is to be will be,” he murmured, with a move¬ ment of shoulders which looked square and strong enough to bear many another burden. “If Pamela comes, she comes, and if she doesn’t, she doesn’t. That’s all about it, except that it will complicate matters infernally if she’s too romantic to accept my offer.”

It did not occur to him that it might complicate mat¬ ters considerably more if she were not. He was a man of but one idea, one point of view at the moment. His mind ran in straight, if tolerably broad lines. Life had hitherto been for him a simple, normal affair. Even the subsequent tepidity of his first marriage had borne no unusual feature. Scores of men whom he knew had never touched vital happiness as far as he could see. Married life, for them, jogged along at best; irked and jarred at worst, unless, as sometimes happened, the bond snapped asunder altogether.

The joy and beauty and ecstasy of love he relegated to the raptures of adolescence, over almost as soon as they were realized.

He got up abruptly, pulled the grass curtain aside, and went into the stiff, half-furnished drawing-room of the bungalow.

He stood there for a moment in the shuttered dusk, looking round with new eyes at the bare, high walls, now lizard-haunted, the empty dusty spaces.

Suddenly it occurred to him that it might be pleasant to hear women’s voices about the place again, the tap of little heels, the whisper of silks; to see young faces, bright eyes, responsive smiles; to have someone waiting there when he came in, someone of his own once more.

Old desires, long deemed dead, pulsed to unexpected life. Primitive man stirred beneath the layers of civi¬ lization and repression, demanding primitive needs, his mate and his lair.

Langrishe gave a half-angry laugh as he strode to the other end of the big stifling room. He laid a- hand on a shutter as if to push it open, then paused, remember¬ ing the blinding glare that poured upon the deserted com¬ pound outside.

“If Pamela comes we might make a garden there next cold weather,” he thought. “If-!”

He turned on this and thrust his hands in his trouser pockets. The thin silk of his open shirt clung to his body, but for the moment he forgot the heat, the dust, the flies, the thousand pricking discomforts of an Indian hot weather in the plains.

“If Pamela comes, before God I’ll do my best to see that she never regrets it,” he vowed.

All at once, as if a lamp had suddenly been lighted in a dark place, Darner Langrishe knew that he had been lonely, not only for the six years of his widowerhood, but for a long day before that.

CHAPTER II “Pam, you’re wanted!”

Kitty Carey’s clear young voice rang with a high in¬ sistence along the corridor, momentarily coming nearer.

“Where? I can’t come. I’m washing my hair.”

Pamela’s answer came after a pause muffled by a tangle of soap-sudsy tresses.

“In the study. You’re to go at once. Mother is there with dad.”

Kitty burst excitedly into the shabby bathroom where her elder sister* was vigorously washing her hair in a cracked basin.

Redolent of life as an April day, Kitty perched herself with a sudden movement on the edge of a bath which sadly needed repainting. In an upper corner of the wall a dark, spreading stain showed where a shoot outside had leaked. A strip of once glazed drab paper curled forlornly downwards. Pamela always meant to make some paste and fasten it up again when she had time. Two of the small panes of the half-opened window were broken, but so far Pamela had never had sufficient leisure to learn the art of glazing.

“Well, what’s the matter now?” she asked with an¬ noyed resignation, glancing at Kitty through a veil of wet dark hair. “It’s a queer thing I can’t even be let wash my hair in peace.”

“It is indeed,” answered Kitty, sympathetically, glow¬ ing like a rose against her dingy background. “I don’t know what they want you for, Pam, but I think it has something to do with a letter. At least I was teaching Snipe to beg in the hall, when dad came in with a letter in his hand and a funny look in his eyes, and asked me where mother was. Then, after mother had been with him for about ten minutes, she came out looking fright¬ fully red and excited, and told me to tell you to go to her at once. ,,

“A letter ?” groaned Pamela. “A bill, you may be sure. Run down, like an angel, Kitty, and tell them if it’s Murphy’s bill that I haven’t a copper till my ducks are sold. If it’s Murphy himself-”

“It isn’t Murphy. It’s a letter, I tell you.” Kitty broke into a soft ripple of laughter. “Oh, Pam, maybe it’s a surprise of some sort!”

Kitty’s blue eyes danced. She was young enough to love surprises. Pamela, at twenty-eight, was old enough to dread them.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, she poured the last can of cold rain-water over her head, squeezed out the rope of soft dark hair, from which the wetting had momentarily robbed its curl, took a bath-towel off the rickety horse and wrapped it round her head, turban-wise. Slipping her faded blue cotton frock over her white shoulders she turned to face Kitty with a look of resignation.

“If they’re by themselves I can go down as I am,” she said.

Her voice was soft, but it lacked the lilt of Kitty’s. Her eyes, deep sapphire as the young girl’s and shaded by the same dark curling lashes, had more depth if less sparkle than her sister’s. Her nose (which she hated) had begun by being straight but turned up with rather a provocative tilt at the end, and her generous mouth ii seemed made rather for love and laughter than the tight lines into which the exigencies of life sometimes com¬ pressed it. There were also lines, faint as yet, but still unmistakable, across her forehead, and at the corners of her eyes lurked the light humorous traceries which laughter brings early even to young faces.

Pamela Carey was more attractive than really pretty. There was character in her level brows, her firm chin, the wide curve of her mouth. Sincerity shone in her clear, straight gaze,: the grip of her strong little hand presaged a friendship not too easily won, but well worth the winning. She was above the average height, slim, small-boned, and light of movement. Her white skin was prone to freckle. At the moment a faint brown dust¬ ing of the obnoxious spots powdered nose and cheeks.

The folds of the Turkish towel about her head lent a curious severity, a touch of aloofness almost, to her aspect. She tucked her arm through her sisters.

“Come along, Kit. We may as well know the worst,” she said ruefully.

She hated appearing before her parents in her present guise. She knew that her father would make his stock remark: “Aha, my Eastern lady!” and that her mother would say with rounded eyebrows: “What! Washing your hair again?”

In Mrs. Carey’s eyes her girls’ tendency to wash their hair “in season and out of season,” as she said plaintively, amounted almost to a mania. As there were usually five of them ready to perform this ablutionary duty an “East¬ ern lady” was very often to be seen wandering among the cool, dim passages at Carrigrennan.

Pamela went reluctantly down the wide shallow stairs, an anxious little frown creasing her forehead. This hasty summons to a family conclave touched the porten¬ tous. She had not been bidden thus to the study since the awful day when her only brother Randall had come home unexpectedly from college pouring an avalanche of bills upon them, which had completely swept away the family monetary resources.

She checked a sigh at the remembrance. Dear old Randall! He had been foolish, thoughtless only, and he had made good afterwards. He had given more than any wretched money could buy—his life for his country. Pamela felt, with a sick throb of longing, that she would give everything she had in the world, everything she might ever have, pinch and scrape to the end of her days, if only she could see the twinkle in his merry eyes or hear the sound of his gay tuneless whistle once more. Only one year in age had separated them. They had been near in spirit as well. Now he was gone.

She paused in the big square hall and took up her father’s tweed cap, which lay with his stick thrown carelessly on the round table in the centre. She put it down again aimlessly.

“Did the letter come by the second post, Kitty, or did it come by hand?” she asked anxiously.

“I don’t know. Dad must have met it in the avenue, however it came,” Kitty answered airily. “What does it matter, anyhow? I’m dying to know what was in it. Aren’t you?”

“No. Don’t go in for a minute, Kitty.”

“Why not?”

Kitty looked at her sister curiously, wondering why she hesitated.

“I don’t know.”

Pamela turned away her head, then stooped to caress a red setter who was lying half under the table.

Her movement seemed to loose a torrent of dogs upon her. In through the door rushed two terriers, and from the centre of an old sofa, near the window, where he had been basking, apparently asleep, in a shaft of dust-filled sunlight, floundered a great brindled bull-dog.

“Down, boys! Down, Rufus! Down, Punch!”

Pamela rose from the swirl of dogs, her white turban knocked slightly to one side, with rakish effect.

“Oh, come on,” cried Kitty. “They’ll only be annoyed if you keep them waiting.”

She ran across the hall and opened the study door. To her gay inconsequent youth the unknown held all the glamour of a fairy-tale. The rosy mists of the future might at any moment thin to reveal the magical. There was nothing that might not happen, any day at any hour. She had no patience with Pamela’s doubts and tremors.

“Here she is!” she cried excitedly. “She’s been washing her hair.”

“Oh, of course,” said Mrs. Carey, but with more resig¬ nation than actual disapproval.

She was a short stout woman, with a comely face set upon an almost ovoid body.

“Humpty-dumpty” her irreverent youngest daughter called her, but as Kitty always hugged her when she said it, the disrespectful jest bore no sting.

The brown-walled, book-lined room looked cool and dim after the glare of the hall outside. Pamela, glancing from one parent to the other, was aware of an atmos¬ phere of tension, of scarcely subdued excitement.

“Kitty needn’t stay, need she?”

Whatever had to be faced, she felt she could bear it better alone with the elders who still treated her as a child, although they were always ready to consult her in times of stress.

“Oh, Pam, how mean of you!” Kitty's brightness clouded.

“Pam is quite right. This—matter—concerns her alone,” said Lucius Carey, looking up from the knee-hole desk behind which he had entrenched himself.

Thus barricaded, he felt master of the situation. In his shabby old leather armchair he knew that he was always more or less at the mercy of his women folk.

Thin and spare, with once fair, greying hair, he peered from beneath tangled brows with the light blue eyes of his kinsman, Darner Langrishe; but whereas Langrishe looked across great spaces to distant realities, Lucius Carey, with the vision of a dreamer, looked ever for horizons which were not there.

A gentleman farmer, as the quaint phrase has it, he was so much more of a gentleman than a farmer that the Carrigrennan acres now yielded but a bare subsistence out of their former abundance.

“Yes,” he repeated musingly, his veined hand on an opened letter, “This concerns Pamela alone.”

“I'm sure it concerns us all, Lucius,” said Mrs. Carey, with a vibration in her tone which made Pamela dart a quick glance at her.

“Then if it concerns us all I may stay, mayn’t I, mummy?” pleaded Kitty, with saucy confidence.

“Indeed you may not,” answered her mother, failing her unexpectedly. “How many more times will you have to be told to run away, Kitty?”

“I think you’re all most frightfully mean,” Kitty declared, marching out of the room with flushed face and tear-stained eyes, banging the door behind her.

Lucius Carey started. “I have a good mind to bring that child back and make her shut the door quietly. She’s getting too old for that sort of thing.”

“Never mind her now, Lucius. She only wanted to see that it was fastened properly.” Mrs. Carey fidgetted on her chair. Her plump hands fluttered and trembled. “Tell Pam the news, like a good man, and give her her letter.”

“What letter?” asked Pamela, a spark of hope, of repressed youth stirring within her. “Is it an invitation anywhere ?”

After all, there could be nothing really terrifying in a letter which concerned her alone. She had no personal debts. Out of what she called her “fowl money,” she paid for everything she wore. There was no unpleasant secret lurking in her past waiting to spring unexpectedly upon her. The only secrets she had ever had were her dreams, and those concerned nobody but herself.

“It is,” announced Mrs. Carey, her eyes sparkling, her round cheeks shaking with suppressed triumph.

“Janet, my dear-”

“I must tell her, Lucius, or I’ll explode. How you can sit there so calm and unconcerned passes my under¬ standing,” cried Mrs. Carey. “It is an invitation, Pam, my dear. An invitation to go to—India!”

“To India? Me?” cried Pamela, ungrammatically, sinking down on the nearest chair. “Mother, you’re joking ?”

India, the land of colour, romance, glamour! The very deepest hidden of all her secret dreams!

The colour ebbed from Pamela’s cheeks, leaving her face white and sharpened to an incredulous intensity. Her eyes darkened and widened.

“I am not, indeed. Am I, Lucius?’’’ Mrs. Carey turned to her husband for support. “Now you can tell her the rest.”

Her breath came quickly. Her brown eyes were i6 bright and darting as those of a bird. She folded her hands across her ample frontage, and looked trium¬ phantly from husband to daughter. Not since the day when Lucius himself had proposed to her had she known such an ineffable moment.

“Your mother has only told you half,” said Mr. Carey slowly. “Of course there are conditions attached to such a proposition-”

“Oh, Lucius, how you drag things out!” interrupted Mrs. Carey impatiently. “Pam, my dear, it is an offer of marriage, a proposal from your cousin Darner Langrishe.”

Pamela caught her breath; her normal, working-day world suddenly disintegrated to a spinning chaos.

“A proposal—from Darner Langrishe—for me?” she jerked out disconnectedly.

“Yes, indeed. He has written to your father. A very proper letter. He wants you to go out to India in October to marry him.”

“But—but—I don’t know him! He doesn’t know me!” gasped Pamela.

“Now, Pam, don’t be foolish. He knows us, and he knows all about you-”

“He doesn’t know a single thing about me! How could he?” Pamela cried, colour rushing back to her cheeks in a flame.

Lucius Carey felt that it was time for him to inter¬ fere. He lifted his head and straightened his bent shoul¬ ders.

“You had better listen to what your cousin says, be¬ fore you go jumping to rash conclusions, Pamela,” he interposed quietly. “He wrote to me and left it to my own judgment as to whether I should give you this letter or not. After due consideration-”

1 7

Across Pamela's mind flashed a rebellious—‘Ten min¬ utes, according to Kitty!”

“We decided that you must choose for yourself.”

The words sounded tolerant and reasonable, but in her mother’s unconcealed exultance and the spark of hope which unwontedly quickened her father’s mild depressed face, Pamela saw Fate closing in upon her.

“They jump at the chance of getting rid of me,” she thought, a swift unusual bitterness momentarily cloud¬ ing her real affection for them.

Gulping down resentment with an effort she asked quietly:

“What else does Darner say?”

“Why don’t you give her her own letter, Lucius?”

“Oh, he has written to me as well?” Pamela groped for the tangible in her bewilderment.

“Yes.” Mr. Carey handed the greyish foreign en¬ velope, whose dull exterior hid the unmistakable jewel of Pamela’s first proposal.

Her fingers closed on it possessively, but she made no attempt to open it.

“Aren’t you going to read Darner’s letter?” asked Mrs. Carey, simmering with curiosity.

“Not here,” answered Pamela, holding the letter close to her, as if she thought her mother might attempt to wrest it from her.

“Poor Darner must be lonely out there,” Mrs. Carey continued. “He wants companionship, especially now that Dido is grown-up and going out to him.”

“I’d have thought he’d want it less than ever for that reason,” Pamela murmured.

“You remember Dido? She took a great fancy to you when they were here ten years ago. So did Darner.”

“Oh, no, mother, he didn’t.”

i8

“He must have, Pam. Look at him, proposing for you now! Ah, he’s one of those quiet sort of men who never show what they really feel.”

“But, mother, his wife was alive then?” Pamela cried in eager protest.

“Surely, Pam, he might take a fancy to his own little cousin without your insinuating that I meant anything nasty! What young people are coming to nowadays, I’m sure I don’t know!”

“Janet, my dear, you’re straying from the point,” in¬ terposed Mr. Carey. “To put the matter in a nutshell, Pam, Darner wants you to marry him, and, as your mother says, be a companion to himself and his mother¬ less girl. He does not pretend to any wild romance. He knows that, as my daughter, you are a well-broughtup girl, a lady in the best sense of that much abused word. He is a Langrishe. No more need be said about that. We may take it for granted that he is a straight, honourable gentleman.”

“That’s all very well!” cried Pamela, feeling the mesh of the net. “But what do you know about him, really, Dad—his thoughts, his feelings, all the little things that are so immensely important.”

“Now you are being absurd, my child. Little things may be irksome or irritating, but they are always trivial and never really important. What exactly do you mean?” asked Lucius Carey, with an air of infinite pa¬ tience and forbearance.

“Pam means has he any queer little habits that might annoy her?” put in Mrs. Carey eagerly.

“No, I don’t!” cried Pamela, stifling a tendency to hysterical laughter.

“Then what do you mean, Pamela?”

Two perturbed faces regarded her. This was not the way in which they had expected her to receive such a gift from heaven as a proposal of marriage.