“Let us say ten minutes to run from the cove to the tower, and-“

“Allow twenty, if you please,” said Stephen. “You portly men of a sanguine complexion often die suddenly, from unconsidered exertion of the heart. Apoplexy, congestion.”

“I wish, I wish you would not say things like that, Doctor,” said Jack in a low tone: they all looked at Stephen with some reproach and Jack added, “Besides, I am not portly.”

It occurs to me,” he said, looking at his friend, who, according to his long-established habit, had plunged straight into the dark comfortable pit of sleep from which nothing would rouse him but the cry of a sail or a change in the wind, “it occurs to me that our race must have a natural propensity to ugliness.You are not an ill-looking fellow, and were almost handsome before you were so pierced, blown up and banged by the enemy and so exposed to the elements; and yet you are to marry a truly beautiful young woman; yet I make no doubt that you will between you produce little common babies, that mewl, pewl and roar all in that same tedious, deeply vulgar, self-centered monotone, drool, cut their teeth, and grow up into plain blockheads.

A most capital dinner, upon my word. The duck was the best I have ever tasted.”

“I was sorry to see you help yourself to him a fourth time: duck is a melancholy meat. In any case, the rich sauce in which it bathed was not at all the thing for a subject of your corpulence. Apoplexy lurks in dishes of that kind. I signaled to you, but you did not attend.”

“Is that why you were looking so mumchance?

He had made his attempt, delivered his charge, and it had failed, now his heart beat quietly again. He was speaking in a companionable, detached voice about merino sheep, the peculiarities of a Spanish rent-roll, the inconvenience of war, a sailor’s chances of prize-money, and he was reaching for his neckcloth when she interrupted him and said, “Stephen, what you said turned my head about so much I hardly know what I answered. I must think. Let us talk about it again in Calcutta. I must have months and months to think. Lord, how pale you have gone again. Come, put on a light gown and we will sit in the court for the fresh air; these lamps are intolerable indoors.

But I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you Stephen. I have been so lonely, and you were in my mind, as clear as a bell, just before I saw you. You are no great shakes at eating in the Indian way, I see… Oh my God, what have you done with your poor hands?”

“It is of no consequence,” said Stephen, darting them out of sight. “They were injured- caught in a machine. It is of no consequence; it will soon pass.

Are you going to take me into keeping too, Stephen?” she asked with a smile.

“No,” he said, endeavoring to imitate her. He privately crossed his bosum, and then, speaking somewhat at random in his agitation, he went on, “I have never made a woman an offer of marriage- am ignorant of- the accepted forms. I am sorry for my ignorance. But I beg you will have the goodness, the very great goodness, to marry me.” As she did not reply, he added, “It would oblige me extremely, Diana.”

“Why, Stephen,” she said at last, still gazing at him in candid wonder. “Upon my word and honour, you astonish me. I can hardly speak. It was the kindest thing you could possibly have said to me. But your friendship, your affection, is leading you away; it is your dear good heart full of pity for a friend that-”

“No, no, no,” he cried passionately. “This is a deliberate, long-meditated statement, conceived a great while since, and matured over twelve thousand miles and more. I am painfully aware,” he said, clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back, “that my appearance does not serve me; that there are objections to my person, my birth, and my religion; and that my fortune is nothing in comparison with that of a wealthy man. But I am not the penniless nonentity I was when we first met; I can offer an honourable if not a brilliant marriage; and at the very lowest I can provide my wife- my widow, my relict- with a decent competence, an assured fortune.