“The dear old flag,” said Muriel fervently, feeling rather a beast thus to play up to him, but excusing herself on the grounds of curiosity as to what he would say next.
“Sometimes it’s hard, though,” he confessed, “and I’m afraid I’ve been reduced more than once to the whisky bottle and baccarat and bad company. Ah! I know that sounds weak,” he exclaimed, as she uttered a little squeak of distress, “but you don’t know the temptations of a lonely man, with nothing to do, cursed with wealth....”
“O, but I can guess,” she replied, intoning her words as though she were speaking Shakespearian lines. “Sunday afternoons, leaning over the parapet, with nothing to do but spit in the river—why shouldn’t you join in a game of chance, instead of going to church? I can quite understand it.”
He looked at her in astonishment, wondering if she were pulling his leg; but in the moonlight he saw only a sympathetic girl, gazing into the distance with an expression of saintly purity.
“It’s worse than that,” he sighed. “A man has temptations that you couldn’t understand, little woman. What he wants is the pure friendship of a girl.”
“An English girl,” she murmured, with fervour.
He bent forward and looked into her eyes. “Lady Muriel,” he said, “will you be a friend to me? Will you be my little English rose?”
“Lord Barthampton ...” she began, wondering how she could terminate a jest of which she was already tiring.
He checked her. “Please call me ‘Charles,’” he begged.
The music began again in the ballroom, and Muriel rose with alacrity. “Come,” she said, dramatically. “Let us go back to the gay and frivolous world.”