“Shirley!” and his fingers closed upon hers.
“I love you, Shirley! From those days when I saw you in Paris,—before the great Gettysburg battle picture, I loved you. You had felt the cry of the Old World, the story that is in its battle-fields, its beauty and romance, just as I had felt the call of this new and more wonderful world. I understood—I knew what was in your heart; I knew what those things meant to you;—but I had put them aside; I had chosen another life for myself. And the poor life that you saved, that is yours if you will take it. I have told your father and Baron von Marhof that I would not take the fortune my father left me; I would not go back there to be thanked or to get a ribbon to wear in my coat. But my name, the name I bore as a boy and disgraced in my father’s eyes,—his name that he made famous throughout the world, the name I cast aside with my youth, the name I flung away in anger,—they wish me to take that.”
She withdrew her hand and rose and looked away toward the western hills.
“The greatest romance in the world is here, Shirley. I have dreamed it all over,—in the Canadian woods, on the Montana ranch as I watched the herd at night. My father spent his life keeping a king upon his throne; but I believe there are higher things and finer things than steadying a shaking throne or being a king. And the name that has meant nothing to me except dominion and power,—it can serve no purpose for me to take it now. I learned much from the poor Archduke; he taught me to hate the sham and shame of the life he had fled from. My father was the last great defender of the divine right of kings; but I believe in the divine right of men. And the dome of the Capitol in Washington does not mean to me force or hatred or power, but faith and hope and man’s right to live and do and be whatever he can make himself. I will not go back or take the old name unless,—unless you tell me I must, Shirley!”
There was an instant in which they both faced the westering sun. He looked down suddenly and the deep feeling in his heart went to his lips.
“It was that way,—you were just like that when I saw you first, Shirley, with the dreams in your eyes.”
He caught her hand and kissed it,—bending very low indeed. Suddenly, as he stood erect, her arms were about his neck and her cheek with its warmth and color lay against his face.
“I do not know,”—and he scarcely heard the whispered words,—“I do not know Frederick Augustus von Stroebel,—but I love—John Armitage,” she said.
Then back across the meadow, through the rose-aisled ways of the quiet garden, they went hand in hand together and answered the Baron’s question.