“There’s one point I’d like to have explained,” Arnold went on. “Something was said about difficulties—difficulties in the way of your marriage, according to my understanding. Difficulties in the way of your marriage to young Merrill, here. Now there shouldn’t be any difficulties of a serious nature, it appears to me; and if there are any, perhaps I could help to iron ’em out.”

Ellen said nothing: merely continued to knit placidly. Nathaniel’s face wore a set, mulish look with which I was only too familiar: a look that meant he would listen reluctantly to whatever might be said about the subject in hand, and pay attention to no word of it.

When his offer went unacknowledged, Arnold raised his eyebrows and tapped a plank with his boot. He rose to his feet suddenly and fixed Nathaniel with a pale and angry eye. “Well!” he rasped. “What is the difficulty! I’ll have an answer and I’ll have it quick!”

“Mercy!” Ellen said. “You’ve frightened me!” Since her voice was unperturbed, and her eyes still fixed on her knitting, I gathered her fright was not serious.

“The only difficulty,” Nathaniel said, “is that we decided we wouldn’t be married just yet.”

“Not just yet?” Arnold cried. “Not just yet? What are you talking about! If this lady left her family and friends to go away with you, there can’t be any talk of ‘not just yet.’ I won’t have it! Not in any detachment under my command!”

He made puffing sounds and glared at Nathaniel: then turned to Ellen again. “Were you a party to this decision, ma’am: this decision not to get married ‘just yet’?”

Ellen sighed, nodded, and slid an anxious glance toward the horn-pout, over which Zelph still crouched morosely.

Arnold rounded on Nathaniel. “Then the whole business is your fault! If you intended to be married in the beginning, and the lady now feels she doesn’t want to be married just yet, then you’ve fallen short as a suitor. It must be your Maine coldness! That’s what it is: it’s that terrible chill you Maine men have in your blood! Damnation, sir, do you mean to tell me that if a lady’s well disposed toward a gentleman to begin with, she can resist him if he won’t take No for an answer? You’re different, you young people, from what we were—no sentiment any more—everything taken for granted! One of you says ‘Let’s get married,’ and the other says ‘All right, but not just now.’ Pah! Where’s the romance in that! Press her, sir: press her! That’s all that’s necessary! Press her enough and there’ll be none of this ‘not just now’ talk!”