“Forgive you?”
“And if I’d been different, more like other girls content with a conventional affection, you wouldn’t have loved me more?”
He took her in his arms and held her as if he would never let her go.
“If you had been different, I wouldn’t have loved you at all,” he said. “But if things had been different, I couldn’t have helped loving you, just the same. I should have been fated to fall in love with Princess Virginia of Baumenburg-Drippe at first sight, exactly I as fell in love with Helen Mowbray—”
“Ah, but at best you’d have fallen in love with Virginia because it was your duty; and you fell in love with Helen Mowbray because it was your duty not to. Which makes it so much nicer.”
“It was no question of duty, but of destiny,” said the Emperor. “The stars ordained that I should love you.”
“Then I wish—” and Virginia laughed happily, as she could afford to laugh now—“that the stars had told me, last summer. It would have saved me a great deal of trouble. And yet I don’t know,” she added thoughtfully, “it’s been a wonderful adventure. We shall often talk of it when we’re old.”
“We shall never be old, for we love each other,” said the Emperor.