“I shall be so frightened,” she went on, “in a cab all alone! Please see me home, if only to the door!”
“All right,” said Boy resolutely. “I’ll come!”
He assisted her into the hansom with the greatest tenderness, and carefully tucked her pretty skirts about her tiny feet,—oh! what charming skirts, all soft and silken and frilled and rustling, like the leaves of fringed French poppies!
“What address?” he inquired.
She gave him a number and street near Sloane Square, and he, confiding the same to the cabman, sprang in beside her, and they rattled away together through the streets, Boy delighted with the adventure and the pleasure of being chosen as the protector and cavalier of so fascinating a being as his companion.
“Isn’t this fun?” she said, her eyes sparkling like jewels in the light reflected from the cab lamps. “I feel so safe now! You ought to know my name, I think. Shall I tell you?”
“If you don’t mind,” answered Boy, still troubled by a tendency to blush at his own temerity—“I should like to know it, so that I might remember it—and you—always!”
This was a fairly good hit, and was promptly responded to on the part of the fair one, by a modest droop of the head and tender side glance.
“How sweet of you to say—that!” she murmured, “but I am afraid you will soon forget. My name is Lenore de Gramont. I am the only daughter of a French nobleman, the Marquis de Gramont.”
Boy blushed more hotly than ever. What a position for him! Here he was, in a hansom cab, with the daughter of a French Marquis! He did not know whether he ought to be proud or humiliated!