Then-- "Why ?" he asked.
The simple monosyllabic query completely confused her.

It was unexpected, and she was at her wit's end how to reply to it.

Moreover, he kept his eyes so pertinaciously fixed upon her that she felt her blood rising to her cheeks and brow in a hot flush of--shame?
Oh no!--not shame, but merely petulant vexation.

The proper way for him to behave at this juncture, so she reflected, would be that he should take her tenderly in his arms and murmur, after the penny-dreadful style of elderly hero, "My darling, my darling! Can you, so young and beautiful, really care for an old fogey like me ?'" to which she would, of course, have replied in the same fashion, and with the most charming insincerity--"Dearest! Do not talk of age! You will never be old to my fond heart!" But to stand, as he was standing, like a rigid figure of bronze, with a hard pale face in which only the eyes seemed living, and to merely ask "Why" she would rather marry him than any other man in the world, was absurd, to say the least of it, and indeed quite lacking in all delicacy of sentiment.

She sought about in her mind for some way out of the difficulty and could find none.