“I hope you are better—after your accident?” ventured the young man in so quivering a voice that one could see that it came from a vibrating heart.
“Yes, thanks,” she coldly answered. “It did not amount to anything.”
“Why, you came near dying—the danger was dreadful,” said Gilbert, at the hight of emotion.
Andrea perceived by this that it was high time that she cut short this chat in the open with a royal gardener.
“Will you not have a rose?” questioned he, shivering.
“Why, how can you offer what is not yours?” she demanded.
He looked at her surprised and overcome, but as she smiled with superciliousness, he broke off a branch of the finest rose-tree and began to pluck the flowers and cast them down with a noble coolness which impressed even this haughty Patrician girl.
She was too good and fair-dealing not to see that she had wantonly wounded the feelings of an inferior who had only been polite to her. Like all proud ones feeling guilty of a fault, she resumed her stroll without a word, although the excuse was on her lips.
“Gilbert did not speak either; he tossed aside the rose-twig and took up the spade again, bending to work but also to see Andrea go away. At the turning of the walk she could not help looking back—for she was a woman.
“Hurrah!” he said to himself; “she is not so strong as me and I shall master her yet. Overbearing with her beauty, title and fortune now rising, insolent to me because she divines that I love her, she only becomes the more desirable to the poor workingman who still trembles as he looks upon her. Confound this trembling, unworthy of a man! but she shall pay some day for the cowardice she makes me feel. I have done enough this day in making her give in,” he added. “I should have been the weaker as I love her, but I was ten times the stronger.”