Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

"There is nothing," he declared firmly, "beyond my reach. You are trying to discourage me. It isn't any use. I am not a prince or a duke or anything like that, although my ancestors were honest enough, I believe. I haven't any trappings of that sort to offer you. If you are as sensible as I think you are, you won't mind that when you come to think it over. The only thing I am ashamed of is my money, because I didn't earn it for myself. You can live in palaces still, if you want to, and if you want to be a queen I'll ferret out a kingdom somewhere and buy it, but I am afraid you'll have to be Mrs. Lane behind it all, you know."

"You really are the most intolerable person," she exclaimed, biting her lip. "How can I get these absurd ideas out of your mind?"

"By telling me honestly, looking in my eyes all the time, that you could never care for me a little bit, however devoted I was," he answered promptly. "You won't be able to do it. I've only one belief in life about these things, and that is that when any one cares for a girl as I care for you, it's absolutely impossible for her to be wholly indifferent. It isn't much to start with, I know, but the rest will come. Be honest with me. Is there any one of the men of your country whom you have met, whom you want to marry?"

She frowned slightly. She found herself, at that moment, comparing him with certain young men of her acquaintance. She was astonished to realise that the comparison was all in his favour. It was for her an extraordinary moment. She had indeed been brought up in palaces and the men whom she had known had been reckoned the salt of the earth. Yet, at that crisis, she was most profoundly conscious that not all the glamour of those high-sounding names, the picturesque interest of those gorgeous uniforms, nor the men themselves, magnificent in their way, were able to make the slightest appeal to her. She remembered some of her own bitter words when an alliance with one of them had been suggested to her. It was she, then, who had been the first to ignore the divine heritage of birth, who had spoken of their drinking habits, pointed to their life of idle luxury and worse than luxury. The man who was at the present moment her suitor forced himself upon her recollection. She knew quite well that he represented a type. They were of the nobility, and they seemed to her in that one poignant but unwelcome moment, hatefully degenerate, men no self-respecting girl could ever think of. Family influence, stern parental words, the call of her order, had half crushed these thoughts. They came back now, however, with persistent force.

"You see," Richard Lane went on, "it mayn't be much that I have to offer you, but in your heart I know you feel what it means to be offered the love of a man who doesn't want you just because you are of his order, or because you are the daughter of a Personage, or for any other reason than because he cares for you as he has cared for no other woman on earth, and because, without knowing it, he has waited for you."

She moved restlessly in her chair. Their conversation was not going in the least along the lines which she had intended. She suddenly remembered her own disquiet of the day before, her curious longing to steal off on some excuse to-day. A week ago she would have been content to have dawdled away the afternoon in the grounds of the villa. Something different had come. From the moment she had entered the rooms, although she had never acknowledged it, she had been conscious, pleasurably conscious of his presence. She was suddenly uneasy.

"I am afraid," she murmured, "that you are quite hopeless."

"If you mean that I am without hope, you are wrong," he answered sturdily. "From the moment I met you I have had but one thought, and until the last day of my life I shall have but one thought, and that thought is of you. There may be no end of difficulties, but I come of an obstinate race. I have patience as well as other things."

She was avoiding looking at him now. She looked instead at her clasped hands.

"I wish I could make you understand," she said, in a low tone, "how impossible all this is. In England and America I know that it is different. There, marriages of a certain sort are freely made between different classes. But in Russia these things are not thought of. Supposing that all you said were true. Supposing, even, that I had the slightest disposition to listen to you. Do you realise that there isn't one of my family who wouldn't cry out in horror at the thought of my marrying—forgive me—marrying a commoner of your rank in life?"