I turned back with my hands clasped behind my head and laughed up at him.
"Why not? They were nothing to me. It was kind to your mother at any rate."
Oh! hypocrite! hypocrite! If he could only have seen me a few minutes before, stealing along in the shadow of the shrubs outside looking about in the darkness till I had found them, and holding them passionately to my lips. They were in my pocket then, wrapped in a lace handkerchief. They are in a secret drawer of my desk now, and there will they remain forever. I do not mind confessing that they are very precious to me. But he does not know that.
He turned away offended and left me. But I went to the piano and sang a wild Neapolitan love song, and when I had finished he was leaning over me with a deep glow in his pale cheeks and his eyes fixed upon mine. Does he know how handsome he is, I wonder? Whence did I get the strength to look into those deep blue eyes, burning with passion, and mock at him?
"You sing divinely of what you know nothing!" he said.
"Isn't that rather a rash assumption?" I answered lightly. "You are paying me a poor compliment in taking it for granted that I never had a lover, Lord Lumley."
"Have you?"
"Oh, yes, heaps!"
"Are you engaged, then?" he asked fiercely.
"How like a man you jump at conclusions!"