“Again I became ‘Major Frank.’ I accompanied my father on his rides, and I saw he was proud of my horsemanship. Sometimes we hunted together, and when he allowed me to drive I was ever ready to show off my daring and skill. In the meantime my nurse died, and now, indeed, I felt the truth of her words—that she was the only person in the world who really loved me. I had to take her place, and fulfil the duties of mistress in the household. My father was expecting a visitor from England——”
She stopped abruptly, and fixing her beautiful blue eyes on me with a strange expression, asked—
“Leopold, have you been in the society of women much?”
“When I lived with my mother I saw many of her friends and visitors; but since——”
“That’s not the question. I ask you if, like most men, you have sometimes suffered from the intermittent fever called love?”
“I have done my best, cousin, to escape it. Knowing myself to be too poor to maintain a wife in these expensive times, I have always observed a strict reserve in my relations with them in order not to be led away from my principles.”
“Then you have never been ‘passion’s slave,’ as Hamlet puts it.”
“My time has always been too much occupied for anything of the sort.”
“So much the better for you; but I am sorry for myself, because you will not be able to give me the information I am seeking.”
“Tell me what you want to know; possibly I can enlighten you.”