She looked at him very sweetly for a moment, and then burst out laughing.
“Dear Hilary,” she said, “remember that it is only two days since we first met, and that this is the first chance of a real talk we have had together. Whereas Lord Carthew and I——”
“You have had many interesting talks, I have no doubt,” he said, morosely, his handsome face clouding. “He is far cleverer than I, and can talk well on any subject. The wonder is that you don’t prefer him to me.”
“Isn’t it?” she assented, demurely, rubbing her cheeks softly against his coat-sleeve. “But there is no accounting for tastes, and—it may be my mad gypsy origin—but I decidedly prefer you.”
He raised one of her little hands to his lips and covered the finger-tips with kisses, smiling in spite of himself at the coquetry which had come so naturally to her in so short a time.
“Go on with what you were saying about the sadness of your life,” he said. “I want to know everything that you told Carthew.”
Stella had had hardly any experience of men; but she was a true woman, and her keen feminine instinct taught her that this man she loved was of a totally different temperament from the man who loved her. Hilary’s mind was of a direct, practical, common-sense order. In all his life he had thought but little of love for women, and now that the feeling overmastered him, he was inclined to question its authority, as well as to fly into paroxysms of jealousy without sufficient reason. He was not in the least conceited, and rather overrated Lord Carthew’s higher mental endowments, together with his eloquent tongue, high rank and wealth, when pitted against his own dower from nature of bone, and muscle, and manly beauty. He knew that Carthew loved Stella, and it would have seemed very natural to him that his passion should be returned. Above all, he did not wish to act toward his friend in a dishonorable and disloyal manner. Against his will, his blood leaped in his veins, as the young girl leaned toward him, lifting her beautiful, innocent eyes, with the light of love shining in them, to his face. Against his will, he clasped his arm about her waist, and felt that the world before him, with all its hopes, was well lost for the sake of a kiss from her soft, red lips.
“I can’t talk to you if you stop me like that,” Stella remonstrated, with a happy little laugh; “and do, pray, remember that that door is partly of glass, and people can see through it. Another moment and they will be having breakfast at the Chase. If my father finds out where I have been, he will half kill me.”
“Is he so bad as that?” he asked, wonderingly.
“He is, indeed. You haven’t even seen him, and you cannot, therefore, understand. Hilary, he hates me, and until this morning I have never been able to understand why, or why, try as I might to like him, and to feel dutifully toward him, a cold shudder of dislike creeps over me when he comes near. Last night he grew furiously angry with me because I refused to marry Lord Carthew, and he told me then for the first time, with the idea, I suppose, of humiliating me, that my dear mamma was not my mother at all, but that I was really the daughter of an ignorant gypsy woman. It seemed too strange to be believed, but it was all true. This morning at six o’clock I climbed out of my bedroom window, as he had locked me into my room, and came here to borrow a horse with which to find out Dr. Netherbridge at Grayling. He confirmed Sir Philip’s words. The first Lady Cranstoun was a lovely gypsy girl, brought up on charity by Sir Philip’s sister, with whom he fell in love, and made a most wretched marriage. Not many days before I was born, my mother, heart-broken at the treatment she received, ran back to her own people, and among them, in a tumble-down little cottage not far from here, I was born, eighteen and a half years ago. So now you understand,” she concluded, triumphantly, “that so far from being a great lady, I come from the class of people who are driven from town to town by the police, branded as thieves and poachers, with the band of every respectable man and woman against them.”