waist! He drew
her close to his breast, at the risk of breaking his most valuable
eyeglass,--and felt his poor weak soul in a quiver of excitement at this
novel and delicious sensation.

"We are--we are of that sort!" he declared courageously. "Why should you
doubt it, Marcia?"

"I believe _yew_ if _yew_ say so," responded Marcia. "But I guess yew're
only fooling me!"

"Fooling you!" Lord Algy was so surprised that he released her quite
suddenly from his embrace--so suddenly that she was a little frightened.
Was she to lose him, after all?

"Marcia," he continued mildly, yet with a certain manliness that did not
ill become him. "I--I hope I am too much of--of a gentleman to--to
'_fool_' any woman, least of all you, after I have, as you say,
compromised you in society by my--my attentions. I--I have very little
to offer you--but such as it is, is yours. In--in short, Marcia, I--I
will try to make you happy if you can--can care for me enough
to--to--marry me!"

Eureka! The game was won! A vision of Masherville Park, Yorkshire, that
"well-timbered and highly desirable residence," as the auctioneers would
describe it, flitted before Marcia's eyes,--and, filled with triumph,
she went straight into her lordly wooer's arms, and kissed him with
thorough transatlantic frankness. She was really grateful to him. Ever
since she had come to England, she had plotted and schemed to become "my
lady" with all the vigor of a purely republican soul,--and now at last,
after hard fighting, she had won the prize for which her soul had
yearned. She would in future belong to the English aristocracy--that
aristocracy which her relatives in New York pretended to despise, yet
openly flattered,--and with her arms round the trapped Masherville's
neck, she foresaw the delight she would have in being toadied by them as
far as toadyism could be made to go.

She is by no means presented to the reader as a favorable type of her
nation--for, of course, every one knows there are plenty of sweet,
unselfish, guileless American girls, who are absolutely incapable of
such unblushing marriage-scheming as hers,--but what else could be
expected from Marcia? Her grandfather, the navvy, had but recently
become endowed with Pilgrim-Father Ancestry,--and her maternal uncle was
a boastful pork-dealer in Cincinnati. It was her bounden duty to ennoble
the family somehow,--surely, if any one had a right to be ambitious, she
was that one! And wild proud dreams of