"If you wait till you die of that complaint you'll live to be as old as—what's his name, Methuselah!" and he laughs. "Why, I feel so proud of winning you that I'm trying all I know not to swagger."
She gives his arm just the faintest pressure.
"Oh how foolish, how foolish!" she murmurs. "To be proud of me!"
"I dare say, but I am, you see! I know I've got one of the loveliest women in the world for a wife, and I shall get beastly conceited, I expect, and perfectly unendurable. It isn't every man who wins the love of an angel."
"Ah, don't," she says. "An angel! They will not think me that, but only a commonplace girl, who knows nothing, and is not fit to be—a duchess!"
She utters the word as if he did not like it, and he colors again.
"Tell me," she says, after a moment. "Tell me whom I shall have to fear most. You see, I don't know even if you have a mother—a father. I don't know anything!"
He is silent a moment, mentally execrating the chain of circumstances which compel him, force him, to—yes, deceive her!
"They are both dead," he says, truthfully. "I haven't any near relations—no brother and sister, I mean. I've an uncle, a Lord Eustace and his two sons who's the next to the dukedom—he and they."