"How is your Royal Highness to-night?" he cried gaily.
"My Royal Highness," she replied, with a little laugh, "is not in a happy frame of mind. Things have gone very wrong with me to-day."
"Indeed?" returned his grace. "Things may be changed by human endeavor. I myself," very lightly, "have been able to change a few. It is perhaps superfluous for me to mention that my time and abilities are at your service always."
"If that be true, my troubles have disappeared entirely," Nancy returned. "They were all of your breeding. I have been thinking of your grace the day long."
"I am honored," he said.
"Perhaps you should know my thoughts before you say that. They were not complimentary in the extreme," she said, looking directly at him with very honest eyes.
"You might," and there was the caressing tone in his voice of which I have already spoken, "tell me wherein I displease you. It would be the effort of my life to change."
He came directly toward her at this, o'er close, it seemed to me, and stood looking down into her eyes, which were fixed upon his.
"You mean it?" she asked.
"By the love I bear you, the best thing my life has ever known—I mean it to the last letter. In fact, I spoke of it this afternoon to your father, Lord Stair. You've made a change in me. I'm not promising too much, but I am intending a reform of myself. Let me put it to you, not too earnestly, lest nothing come of it, but so you can get the drift of my thoughts.