And then Lord Lambeth, touching his hat a little, shook hands with Bessie. “Fancy your being here!” he said. He was blushing and smiling; he looked very handsome, and he had a kind of splendor that he had not had in America. Bessie Alden’s imagination, as we know, was just then in exercise; so that the tall young Englishman, as he stood there looking down at her, had the benefit of it. “He is handsomer and more splendid than anything I have ever seen,” she said to herself. And then she remembered that he was a marquis, and she thought he looked like a marquis.
“I say, you know,” he cried, “you ought to have let a man know you were here!”
“I wrote to you an hour ago,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“Doesn’t all the world know it?” asked Bessie, smiling.
“I assure you I didn’t know it!” cried Lord Lambeth. “Upon my honor I hadn’t heard of it. Ask Woodley now; had I, Woodley?”
“Well, I think you are rather a humbug,” said Willie Woodley.
“You don’t believe that—do you, Miss Alden?” asked his lordship. “You don’t believe I’m a humbug, eh?”
“No,” said Bessie, “I don’t.”
“You are too tall to stand up, Lord Lambeth,” Mrs. Westgate observed. “You are only tolerable when you sit down. Be so good as to get a chair.”
He found a chair and placed it sidewise, close to the two ladies. “If I hadn’t met Woodley I should never have found you,” he went on. “Should I, Woodley?”