"It does?" cried Carolina. "Then why don't you?"
He looked at her sharply. Was she making fun of him?
"You are a rich young lady. I am a poor man. Can I rebuild Sunnymede with these?" He held out two fine, strong, symmetrical hands.
Carolina looked at them appreciatively before she answered.
"I am a poor young woman, but I intend to rebuild Guildford with, these!" And she held out beside his two of the prettiest hands and wrists and arms that Moultrie La Grange had ever seen in his life, and he at once said so. And Carolina, instead of being bored, as was her wont in other days, was so frankly pleased that she blushed, and said to herself that the reason she believed this man meant what he said was because she was poor, and he could not possibly be paying court to a wealth that she had lost. But the truth of the matter was that she believed him because she wanted to. It gave her an exquisite and unknown pleasure to have this man tell her over and over, as he did, that her hands were the most beautiful he had ever seen, and Carolina looked at them in a childish wonder, and as if she had never seen them before. And it was not until she had laid them in her lap again, and they were partly hidden, that she could bring the conversation back to anything like reason.
"How do you mean?" he questioned. "You can't do a thing without money. And I hear--" he stopped in confusion, and his forehead reddened.
"You know that we have lost ours," supplemented Carolina. "Well, you have heard correctly. Every dollar of my fortune is gone!" Her voice took on so triumphant a ring that Moultrie looked up at her in surprise. He did not know that part of her exultation came from the joy it gave her to be able to proclaim her poverty to this man out of all the world, and thus put herself on a level with him.
"I have only," she continued, "a little laid by which came from the sale of my jewels." Then, as she still saw the questions in his eyes which he forebore to ask, she added: "Do you want me to tell you about it all?"
"More than anything in the world," he assured her. And something in his tone shook the girl so that she paused a little before she began.
"Well, I suppose you know that when Sherman, my brother, mortgaged Guildford, Colonel Yancey bought the mortgage and foreclosed it. That is how he got possession of Guildford."