If you are as
sensible as I think you are, you won't mind that when you come to think
it over. The only thing I am ashamed of is my money, because I didn't
earn it for myself. You can live in palaces still, if you want to, and
if you want to be a queen I'll ferret out a kingdom somewhere and buy
it, but I am afraid you'll have to be Mrs. Lane behind it all, you
know."

"You really are the most intolerable person," she exclaimed, biting her
lip. "How can I get these absurd ideas out of your mind?"

"By telling me honestly, looking in my eyes all the time, that you could
never care for me a little bit, however devoted I was," he answered
promptly. "You won't be able to do it. I've only one belief in life
about these things, and that is that when any one cares for a girl as I
care for you, it's absolutely impossible for her to be wholly
indifferent. It isn't much to start with, I know, but the rest will
come. Be honest with me. Is there any one of the men of your country
whom you have met, whom you want to marry?"

She frowned slightly. She found herself, at that moment, comparing him
with certain young men of her acquaintance. She was astonished to
realise that the comparison was all in his favour. It was for her an
extraordinary moment. She had indeed been brought up in palaces and the
men whom she had known had been reckoned the salt of the earth. Yet, at
that crisis, she was most profoundly conscious that not all the glamour
of those high-sounding names, the picturesque interest of those gorgeous
uniforms, nor the men themselves, magnificent in their way, were able to
make the slightest appeal to her. She remembered some of her own bitter
words when an alliance with one of them had been suggested to her. It
was she, then, who had been the first to ignore the divine heritage of
birth, who had spoken of their drinking habits, pointed to their life of
idle luxury and worse than luxury. The man who was at the present moment
her suitor forced himself upon her recollection. She knew quite well
that he represented a type. They were of the nobility, and they seemed
to her in that one poignant but unwelcome moment, hatefully degenerate,
men no self-respecting girl could ever think of. Family influence, stern
parental words, the call of her order, had half crushed these thoughts.
They came back now, however, with persistent force.

"You see," Richard Lane went on, "it mayn't be much that I have to offer
you, but in your hea