He stretched out his hand and caught hers, wet and perfumed with the roses.
"Antonia, my love, my divinity, this comedy of friendship must end. Dear girl, do you not know that I adore you?"
She tried to draw her hand from his grasp, and looked at him with unutterable astonishment, but not in anger.
"You are surprised! Did you think that I could come here day after day, for a year—see you and hear you, be your friend and companion—and not love you? By Heaven, child, you must have thought me the dullest clay that ever held a human soul, if you could think so."
She looked at him still, mute and grave, deep blushes dyeing her cheeks, and her eyes darkly serious.
"Indeed, your lordship, I have never thought of you but as of a friend whose kindness honoured me beyond my deserts. Your rank, and the difference of our ages, prevented me from thinking of you as a suitor."
He started, and dropped her hand; and his face, which had flushed as he talked to her, grew pale again.
"Great God!" he thought, "she takes my avowal of love for an offer of marriage."
He would not have her deceived in his intentions for an instant. He had not always been fair and above-board in his dealings with women; but to this one he could not lie.
"Your suitor, in the vulgar sense of the word, I can never be, Antonia," he said gravely. "Twenty years ago, when my wife eloped with the friend I most trusted, and when I discovered that I had been a twelve-months' laughing-stock for the town—by one section supposed the complacent husband, by another the blind fool I really was—in that hateful hour I swore that I would never again give a woman the power of dishonouring my name. My heart might break from a jilt's ill-usage—but that, the name which belongs not to me only, but to all of my race who have borne it in the past or who will bear it in the future—that should be out of the power of woman's misconduct. And so to you whom I love with a passion more profound, more invincible than this heart ever felt for another since it began to beat, I cannot offer a legal tie; but I lay my adoring heart, my life, my fortune at your feet, and I swear to cleave to you and honour you with a constant and devoted affection which no husband upon this earth can surpass."