CHAPTER IV.
“Daisy,” said Rex, gently, as he led her away from the lights and the echoing music out into the starlight that shone with a soft, silvery radiance over hill and vale, “I shall never forgive myself for being the cause of the cruel insult you have been forced to endure to-night. I declare it’s a shame. I shall tell Pluma so to-morrow.”
“Oh, no––no––please don’t, Mr. Rex. I––I––had no right to waltz with you,” sobbed Daisy, “when I knew you were Pluma’s lover.”
“Don’t say that, Daisy,” responded Rex, warmly. “I am glad, after all, everything has happened just as it did, otherwise I should never have known just how dear a certain little girl had grown to me; besides, I am not Pluma’s lover, and never shall be now.”
“You have quarreled with her for my sake,” whispered Daisy, regretfully. “I am so sorry––indeed I am.”
Daisy little dreamed, as she watched the deep flush rise to Rex’s face, it was of her he was thinking, and not Pluma, by the words, “a certain little girl.”
Rex saw she did not understand him; he stopped short in the 23 path, gazing down into those great, dreamy, pleading eyes that affected him so strangely.
“Daisy,” he said, gently, taking her little clinging hands from his arm, and clasping them in his own, “you must not be startled at what I am going to tell you. When I met you under the magnolia boughs, I knew I had met my fate. I said to myself: ‘She, and no other, shall be my wife.’”
“Your wife,” she cried, looking at him in alarm. “Please don’t say so. I don’t want to be your wife.”
“Why not, Daisy?” he asked, quickly.