"And yet you would be my friend--you whom people call proud--you whose very name is history! I cannot believe it, Lord Arleigh."
There was a wistful look in her eyes, as though she would fain believe that it were true, yet that she was compelled to plead even against herself.
"We cannot account for likes or dislikes," he said; "I always look upon them as nature's guidance as to whom we should love, and whom we should avoid. The moment I saw you I--liked you. I went home, and thought about you all day long."
"Did you?" she asked, wonderingly. "How very strange!"
"It does not seem strange to me," he observed. "Before I had looked at you three minutes I felt as though I had known you all my life. How long have we been talking here? Ten minutes, perhaps--yet I feel as though already there is something that has cut us off from the rest of the world, and left us alone together. There is no accounting for such strange feelings as these."
"No," she replied, dreamily, "I do not think there is."
"Perhaps," he continued, "I may have been fanciful all my life; but years ago, when I was a boy at school, I pictured to myself a heroine such as I thought I should love when I came to be a man."
She had forgotten her sweet, half sad shyness, and sat with faint flush on her face, her lips parted, her blue eyes fixed on his.
"A heroine of my own creation," he went on; "and I gave her an ideal face--lilies and roses blended, rose-leaf lips, a white brow, eyes the color of hyacinths, and hair of pale gold."
"That is a pretty picture," she said, all unconscious that it was her own portrait he had sketched.