“It is my privilege to listen,” he said.
“It is that I am afraid I must be very different from the girls whom you have known. My ways, my thoughts, you might not like them; you might wish me to be different from myself—or I might not understand you,” she added very timidly.
“In asking a lady to be my wife, I think of no other woman,” said Alvar. “In my eyes you are all that is charming.”
“This would not have occurred to me,” said Virginia; “but since I came home I have not been very happy, because it is so hard to accommodate oneself to people who think of everything differently from oneself. If that was so with us—with you—”
“My thoughts shall be your thoughts,” said Alvar. “You shall teach me to be what you wish—what my brother is. I know well,” and he rose to his feet again and stood before her, “I am not clever, I do not know how to do those things the English admire; my face, my speech, is strange. Is that my fault; is it my fault that my father has hated and shunned his son? Miss Seyton, I can but offer you myself. If I displease you—”
Alvar paused. Virginia had been pleading against herself, and before his powerful attraction her misgivings melted away. She rose too, and came a step towards him.
“I will trust you,” she said; and Alvar, more moved than he could himself have anticipated, poured forth a torrent of loving words and vows to be, and to do all she could wish. But he did not know, he did not understand, what she asked of him, or what he promised.
“But we must be our true selves to each other,” she said afterwards, as they stood together, when he had won her to tell him that his foreign face and tones were not displeasing to her—not at all. No, she did not wish that he was more like his brothers.
“I will be always your true lover and your slave,” said Alvar, kissing the hand that she had laid on his. “And now must I not present myself to your father? He will not, I hope, think the foreigner too presuming.”
“There is papa,” said Virginia, glancing out of the window; “he is walking on the terrace. Look, you can go out by this glass door.” And leaving Alvar to encounter this far from formidable interview, she ran away up to the little oak room in search of her cousin.