Who could resist the joy and gladness, the freshness, the youth, the girlishness which emanated from Ursula's entire personality? The two other girls pressed closely round her, giggling like school-children at sight of the rough, sentimental device affixed to the love poem.
The Duchess vainly endeavoured to keep up a semblance of sternness, but she could not meet those laughing eyes, now dark, now blue, now an ever-changing grey, alive with irrepressible mischief, yet full of loving tenderness. She felt that her wrath would soon melt in the sunshine of that girlish smile.
"Lady Ursula, this is most unseemly," she said as coldly as she could. "How came you by this poem?"
Ursula threw her arms round the feebly-resisting old dame.
"Hush!" she whispered, "in your dear old ears! I found it, sweet Duchess . . . beside my stockings . . . when I came out of my bath!"
"Horror!"
"Now, Duchess! dear, sweet, darling, beautiful Duchess, tell me, who think you wrote this poem? And who—who think you placed it near my stockings?"
The Duchess was almost speechless, partly through genuine horror, but chiefly because a sweet, fresh face was pressed closely to her old cheek.
"'Twas not the Earl of Norfolk," continued Ursula meditatively. She seemed quite unconscious of the enormity of her offence, and sought the eyes of her young friends in confirmation of these various surmises. "He cannot write verses. Nor could it be my lord of Overcliffe, for he would not know where to find my stockings."
"The vanity of the child!" sighed Her Grace. "Think you these great gentlemen would write verses to a chit of a girl like you?"