"It is not at all odd. You are here," answered the Prince. "You said at déjeuner that you were coming, if you had to come alone. Eh bien? I saw Miss Beechy and Sir Ralph Moray driving together, deep in Baedeker. My heart told me where you were; and I arrive to find you looking like Juliet come to life again. Perhaps it is so indeed. Perhaps you were Juliet in another incarnation. Yes, I feel sure you were. And I was Romeo."
"I'm sure you were not," I replied; but I could not help laughing at his stagey manner, though I was more annoyed than ever now, and annoyed with myself too. "I particularly wished to be alone here, or I wouldn't have slipped away from Beechy and Sir Ralph, so—"
"And I particularly wished to be alone here with you, or I wouldn't have followed when you had slipped away from them," he broke in. "Oh, Miss Destrey—my Madeleine, you must listen to me. There could be no place in the world more appropriate to the tale of a man's love for a woman than this, where a man and woman died for love of one another."
"I thought you called all this 'nonsense'?" I cut him short. "No, Prince, neither here nor anywhere must you speak of love to me, for I don't love you, and never could."
"I know that you mean to shut yourself away from the world," he interrupted me again. "But you shall not. It would be sacrilege. You—the most beautiful, the most womanly girl in the world—to—"
"No more, please!" I cried. "It doesn't matter what my future is to be, for you will not be in it. I—"
"I must be in it. I adore you. I can't give you up. Haven't you seen from the first how I loved you?"
"I thought I saw you liked trying to flirt when no one was looking. That sounds rather horrid, but—it's the truth."
"You misjudged me cruelly. Have you no human ambition? I could place you among the highest in any land. With me, your beauty should shine as it never could in your own country. Is it nothing to you that I can make you a Princess?"
"Less than nothing," I answered, "though perhaps it would be pretty of me to thank you for wanting to make me one. So I do thank you; and I'll thank you still more if you will go now, and leave me to my thoughts."