"You said something like that last night," he said. "Darling, I have wished it often. You wish that I were plain Mr. Brown."
"No, no," she said, with a smile; "not that."
"That I were a Mr. Wyndward——"
"With no castle," she broke in. "Ah, if that could be! If you were only, say, a workman! How good that would be! Think! you would live in a little cottage, and you would go to work, and come home at night, and I should be waiting for you with your tea—do they have tea or dinner?" she broke off to inquire, with a laugh.
"You see," he said, returning her laugh, "it would not do. Why, Stella, you were not made for a workman's wife; the sordid cares of poverty are for different natures to yours. And yet we should be happy, we two." And he sighed wistfully. "You would be glad to see me come home, Stella?"
"Yes," she said, half seriously, half archly. "I have seen them in Italy, the peasants' wives, standing at the cottage doors, the hot sunset lighting up their faces and their colored kerchiefs, waiting for their husbands, and watching them as they climbed the hills from the pastures and the vineyards, and they have looked so happy that I—I have envied them. I was not happy in Italy, you know."
"My Stella!" he murmured. His love for her was so deep and passionate, his sympathy so keen that half phrases were as plainly understood by him as if she had spoken for hours. "And so you would wait for me at some cottage door?" he said. "Well, it shall be so. I will leave England, if you like—leave the castle and take some little ivy-green cottage."
She smiled, and shook her head.
"Then they would have reason to complain," she said; "they would say 'she has dragged him down to her level—she has taught him to forget all the duties of his rank and high position—she has'—what is it Tennyson says—'robbed him of all the uses of life, and left him worthless.'"
Lord Leycester looked up at the exquisite face with a new light of admiration.