"You improve upon acquaintance, Miss Brace. You are the first lady whom I have heard plead guilty to bad temper. As a rule, women prefer making themselves out to be angelic."
"I am very far from that," said Doris, frankly; "nor am I naturally bad-tempered. It is because nothing in my life pleases or interests me."
"Not even your lover?" he said, bending over her and whispering the words.
She blushed under his keen gaze. Her words had betrayed more than she meant to betray.
Then he added:
"Would you like it changed—this dull life of yours—into one of fairy brightness?"
"I should; but it will not be possible. My fate in the future is fixed—nothing can alter it."
"Yes," he said, gently, "there is one thing that can alter it, and only one—your will and mine."
Then he seemed to think that for a time he had said enough. He looked over the trees, and began to talk to her about the flowers. Doris did not much care about that—she had not come out to listen to the praises of flowers; she would rather ten thousand times over that her lordly lover had praised herself.
While he was talking, she was thinking of many things. Was it a dream, or a reality, that she, Doris Brace, daughter of Mark and Patty Brace, was really talking to a lord, listening to his compliments, that he admired her quite as much as Earle did? It was more like a dream than a reality. He, who had been half over the world, who belonged to the highest society, who had seen and known the most beautiful women in England, to be talking to her so easily, so kindly.