"But your liking was great enough to make you mistake it for love. Women's instincts are quicker and keener in these relations than men's are, and I saw that you did not love me as a real woman has to be loved, and, to be quite frank with you, some one else did. I like you very much, Lord Leighton, and I am going to go on liking you; but, you see, I could not give you what I had already given away. Now, you have told me so much that you ought to tell me a little more. How did your sudden enlightenment on that interesting subject come about?"
He was infinitely relieved by the absolutely frank and friendly way in which she had treated the whole subject, and so he had courage to reply with a laugh:
"In short, Miss Marmion, you ask me who the other girl is. Well, you certainly have a right to know, because, curiously enough, I might never have got to know her but for you——"
"Is it Brenda?"
The question was whispered, and he replied in a whisper:
"Yes; do you think I have any chance?"
A cohort of wild cats would not have torn Brenda's secret out of her friend's soul, and so she replied in a tone that was almost judicious in its evenness:
"That, my friend, is a question that you can only get answered by asking another—and you must ask her, not me."
"Oh yes, of course I must," he said rather limply. "But she's so splendid—so beautiful, so exquisite—and—I do wish she wasn't so very rich. You see, even if I had the great good fortune to—to get her to marry me, I have lots for both; and, you know, the moment an Englishman with a title gets engaged to an American millionairess everybody says that he is simply dollar-hunting."
"That, unfortunately, is usually too well justified by the facts," she replied seriously. "But only the most idiotic and ignorant of gossips could possibly say that of you. Every one who is any one knows that the Kyneston coronet does not want re-gilding."