"I hope you displayed less reticence regarding your station in the world to that woman you were in love with," said she.
"That woman I was in love with?" John caught her up. "That woman I am in love with, please."
"Oh? Are you still in love with her?" Maria Dolores wondered. "It is so long since you have spoken of her, I thought your heart was healed."
"If I have not spoken of her, it has been because I was under the impression that you had tacitly forbidden me to do so," John informed her.
"So I had," she admitted. "But I find that there is such a thing—as being too well obeyed."
She brought out her last words, after the briefest possible suspension, hurriedly, in a voice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own audacity. John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her. But she, according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes. He could see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.
"Oh," he cried, "I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall end by doing the dishonourable thing."
"Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain's heir?" she asked.
"I never thought of it. Why should I?" said John.
"When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you might have remembered that your birth counted for something. With us Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,—for infinitely more than money."