"Confound his impudence!" fumed Montrose angrily.
"No impudence at all, Douglas. Julian is my very good friend: nothing more, I assure you. But if I had not met you, and if my father had insisted upon my becoming Don Pablo's wife, I should have married Julian."
"Oh, Alice," in a tone of deep reproach, "do you love him and not me?"
"No. I respect him. If I loved him you would not now be sitting beside me."
Still Montrose was not satisfied. "Is he good-looking?"
"Very; in a large stolid Anglo-Saxon way. He's an artist, but I don't think one would call him clever except as a painter of pictures."
"I see that you don't love him," said Douglas, his brow clearing; "but does Hardwick—that is his name, isn't it?—love you?"
"No," rejoined Alice promptly, "he thought that he did, but he really does not in the way a woman wants to be loved. He proposed and I rejected him on those grounds. Now he understands that I am right, and we have settled to be great friends."
"All the same you said you would have married him if——"
"If my father had insisted on my becoming the wife of Don Pablo," interrupted Alice swiftly. "Can't you understand, Douglas? I detest this Spaniard, who is such a friend of my father, and of two evils I was prepared to choose the lesser. I did not want to marry Julian any more than I wanted to marry Don Pablo. But Julian is at least human, so——"