, blue eyes had seen
right down into the depths of his heart. He had been clumsy, if nothing
else, and he had always thought that clumsiness was inexcusable. He had
a guilty sense that while Beth was still the little lady to her finger
tips, born to a natural nobility, he, the Grand Duke Peter, had been the
boor, the vulgar proletarian. The look in her eyes had shamed him as
the look in his own eyes had shamed her. She had known what his wooing
meant, and it hadn't been what she wanted. The mention of love on lips
that kissed as his had done was blasphemy.

Yes. He cared what she thought of him--and he vainly cast about for a
way in which to justify himself. To make matters worse Beth still
believed that this was the payment he exacted for what he had done for
her, what he had proposed to do for her, that he measured her favors in
terms of value received. What else could she think but that? Every hour
of his devotion to her music defamed her.

The situation was intolerable. In the morning he went seeking her at her
home. The house was open. No one in Black Rock village locked doors by
day or night. Beth was not there. A neighbor said that she had gone
early alone into the woods and Peter understood. If she hadn't cared for
him she wouldn't have needed to go to the woods to be alone. Of course
she didn't appear at the Cabin the next day, and Peter searched for
her--fruitlessly. She weighed on his conscience, like a sin unshrived.
He had to find her to explain the unexplainable, to tell her what her
confidence had meant to him, to recant his blasphemy of her idols in
gentleness and repentance.

As he failed to find her, he wrote her a note, asking her forgiveness,
and stuck it in the mirror of the old hat-rack in the hall. Many women
in Europe and elsewhere, ladies of the great world that Beth had only
dreamed about, would have given their ears (since ear puffs were in
fashion) to receive such a note from Peter. It was a beautiful note
besides--manly, gentle, breathing contrition and self-reproach. Beth
merely ignored it. Whatever she thought of it and of Peter she wanted
to deliberate a longer while.

And so another music lesson hour passed while Peter sat alone in the
Cabin waiting. That night two letters were brought to him. The
superscription of one was scrawled in a boyish hand. The other was
scented, dainty, of pale lavender, and bore a familiar handwriting and a
familiar coronet. In amazement he opened this fir