“But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were alone. The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes humbly. “Are you so sure you’ve waited long enough—I mean, my friend, for time to bring the best out of someone you love?”
“But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you see, the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I have quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.”
Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It hurts to hear this. It hurts me—for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!”
The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me no more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss Lamb.”
“You say that! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find her crying for her lost love.”
“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a matter of fact, while I was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as though—look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss Lamb? I’d rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after that fashion. But let us talk of something else. Of you!”
“Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....”
“Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!”
“Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!”
“Bravo, bravo!”