Immediately afterward he had taken her hand in his own. She resisted neither its clasp nor its pressure.
"You know that I love you," she now heard him say, though the leap of her heart made his words sound far off, confused, unreal. "You must have known it days ago! There—my resolve is broken! But what can I do? You have stooped downward from your high state by telling me that I am better than you. I am not better than you, Pauline! I am below you—all the world would say so except yourself. But you don't care for the world. Well, then I will despise it, too, because you bid me. I never respected what you represent until you made me respect it by making me love you. Now I respect and love it, both, because you are a part of it. This is what your project, your ambition, has come to. Ah! how pitiful a failure! you're disgusted with your salon—you have been ill-treated, rebuffed, deceived! The little comedy is played to the end—and what remains? Only a poor newspaper-fellow, a sort of Irish adventuring journalist, who offers you his worthless heart to do what you choose with it! What will you choose to do with it? I don't presume to advise, to demand—not even to ask! If you said you would marry Ralph Kindelon you would be making a horrible match! Don't let us forget that. Don't let us forget how Mrs. Poughkeepsie would storm and scold!"
He had both her hands in both his own, now. She looked at him with eyes that sparkled and swam in tears. But though she did not withdraw her hands, she receded from him while brokenly saying:
"I—I don't care anything about Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie. But there—there is something else that I do care about. It—it seems to steal almost like a ghost between us—I can't tell why—I have no real reason to be troubled as I am—it is like a last and most severe distress wrought by this failure of mine with all those new people.... It is the thought that you have made Cora Dares believe that you meant to marry her."
Pauline's voice died away wretchedly, and she drooped her head as the final faint word was spoken. But she still let Kindelon hold her hands. And his grasp tightened about them as she heard him answer:
"I suppose Cora Dares may have believed that.... But, good God! am I so much to blame? I had never met you, Pauline. It was before I went to Ireland the last time—I never asked her to marry me—It was what they call a flirtation. Am I to be held to account for it? Hundreds of men have been foolish in this way before myself—Have you raised me so high only to dash me down?—Won't you speak? Won't you tell me that you forgive a dead fancy for the sake of a living love? Are you so cruel?—so exacting?"
"I am not cruel," she denied, lifting her eyes....
It was a good many minutes later that she said to him, with the tears standing on her flushed cheeks, and her fluttered voice in truly sad case,
"I—I am going to accept the Irish adventuring journalist (as—as he calls himself) for my husband, though he—he has never really asked me yet."
"He could not ask you," affirmed Kindelon, with by no means his first kiss. "Like every subject who wishes to marry a princess, he was forced to recognize a new matrimonial code!"