ell, it is
not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach
you."

"No, you keep saying that," he observed, with gloomy slowness of
utterance. "But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as
well have it out."

"Yes," she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his
with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. "I married one
man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another
because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am.
There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am
his daughter; that explains everything."

The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect
upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new
personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced
cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a
woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all--a woman to whom he could
talk on terms of intimacy.

"Rubbish!" he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal
smile. "You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply
came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would
have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence."

To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of
answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action
too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.

"The trouble has been," he declared, "that I've been too much afraid of
you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am,
that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right
enough now. You ARE finer than I am--God knows there's no dispute about
that--but that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands
off!' all around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the
cheek to capture you and carry you off--and I ought to have had the
pluck to make you love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm
going to do!"

To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to
gaze with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread
below them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and
then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say
that there was any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm
to himself with new conviction, as he looked down upon