“As you would laugh at me, Lord Neville, if I believed what you said!” she retorted, not sharply, but with a sweet gravity that was indescribable.
“I said I would tell you the truth, and I’ve told nothing but the truth,” he said, earnestly. “I dare say it seems strange to you that I should have this feeling about our meeting yesterday. I dare say you forgot all about it half-an-hour afterward! Why should you remember it, you who have so much to think of?”
Doris turned her face away, lest her eyes should betray her, and tell him how much, how constantly she had thought of him!
“You,” he went on, “who are so clever and gifted, a great actress, with no end of people round you——”
She looked at him with a pensive smile.
“But you are wrong, quite wrong,” she said. “I am not a great actress. Last night was my first success, if success it was——”
“There is no ‘if’ about it!” he said, with fervent enthusiasm. “It was a tremendous success! Why, I heard people declare that there had been nothing like it since Kate Terry’s Juliet! And I—though I’m not of much account—I was never so much carried out of myself. Why, to tell you how great and grand you were, I actually forgot that you were the young lady who was so good to me yesterday, and only thought of you as Shakespeare’s Juliet; and I felt quite ashamed that I had ever given so much trouble to so great a personage.”
His warm, ardent praise touched her, and her lips quivered.
“Juliet was only a simple girl, after all,” she said. “If she had chanced to have been placed in my position yesterday she would have done the same.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’m not clever, like you,” and he pushed his hat off his brows with a deprecatory gesture. “But I know you must have something else to think of than the fellow who was such an idiot as to jump a hedge before he saw what was on the other side; and, of course, you must have no end of—of people round you!”