take himself over the water? Couldn't we bribe his diocesan to call him
before the Arches Court? Surely those long coats, so like the little
wooden men in Noah's Ark, and that straightened hair, so mathematically
parted down the centre, look 'perverted' enough to warrant it."

Nina shook her head. "Unhappily, he is here for six months for ill
health!--the sick-leave of clergymen who wish for a holiday, and are too
holy to leave their flock without an excuse to society."

Vaughan laughed, then sighed. "Six months--and you have been here four
already! Eusebius hates me cordially--all my English relatives do, I
believe; we do not get on together. They are too cold and conventional
for me. I have some of the warm Bohemian blood, though God knows I've
seen enough to chill it to ice by this time; but it is _not_ chilled--so
much the worse for me," muttered Ernest "Tell me," he said,
abruptly--"tell me why you took the trouble to defend me so generously
this morning?"

She looked up at him with her frank, beaming regard. "Because they dare
to misjudge you, and they know nothing, and are not worthy to know
anything of your real self."

He pressed his lips together as if in bodily pain. "And what do you
know?"

"Have you not yourself said that you talk to me as you talk to no one
else?" answered Nina, impetuously; "besides--I cannot tell why, but the
first day I met you I seemed to find some friend that I had lost before.
I was certain that you would never misconstrue anything I said, and I
felt that I saw further into your heart and mind than any one else could
do. Was it not very strange?" She stopped, and looked up at him. Ernest
bent his eyes on the ground, and breathed fast.

"No, no," he said at last; "yours is only an ideal of me. If you knew me
as I really am, you would cease to feel the--the interest that you
say----"

He stopped abruptly; facile as he was at pretty compliments, and versed
in tender scenes as he had been from his school-days, the longing to
make this girl love him, and his struggle not to breathe love to her,
deprived him of his customary strength and nonchalance.

"I do not fear to know you as you are," said Nina, gently. "I do not
think you yourself allow all the better things that there are in you.
People have not judged you rightly, and you have been too proud to prove
their error to them. You have found pleasure in running counter to the
prudish and illiberal bigots who presumed to judge