The Doctor had a smile on his meditative features; his eyes were cast down he looked a trifle embarrassed.
"Forgive me," Arnold was saying, with some earnestness, "if this course seems to you rather irregular." "Not at all! Not at all! But I can only assure you of my honest inability to answer the question.

Try, my dear fellow! _Solvitur quaerendo_!" Jacks' behaviour did, in fact, appear to the Doctor a little odd.

That the young man should hint at his desire to ask Miss Derwent to marry him, or perhaps ask the parental approval of such a step, was natural enough; the event had been looming since the beginning of the voyage home.

But to go beyond this, to ask the girl's father whether he thought success likely, whether he could hold out hopes, was scarcely permissible.

It seemed a curious failure of tact in such a man as Arnold Jacks.
The fact was that Arnold for the first time in his life, had turned coward.