"I do not want your love," she answered, stamping her little foot impatiently on the turf, as if the love he confessed for her lay veritably beneath her feet.
His weakly, handsome face grew pale at her impetuous words.
"Wait, Irene, before you so cruelly reject me," he exclaimed. "You are young, but not too young to know that it is wrong to trifle with the human heart."
"I have not trifled with yours," she interrupted, flushing at the imputation.
"But all the same your beauty has wiled my heart from me," he said. "I have loved you from the first hour I saw your charming face. I lay my heart, my hand, my fortune at your feet, Irene. Will you not take pity on me and be my wife?"
The flowers fell from her hands down upon the sweet, green turf, and her face grew pale with emotion. It was the first time a lover had ever wooed her, yet she was a wife—a wife unwooed and unwon—yet bound, how plainly she recalled the solemn, fateful words, by ties that no man "should put asunder."
She looked at the dark, handsome face that showed at its best with that light of love lingering on it. Between her and it another face arose, languid, careless, indifferent, yet fascinating for the soul that looked out of the bright, yet soft brown eyes. She remembered that she had thought him handsome—handsomer than any of Bertha's and Elaine's beaux—a flush rose slowly to her face as she remembered that she had told him so.
"No wonder he despised me," she said to herself, and she turned back to Mr. Revington trying to forget Guy Kenmore, for she was now ashamed of the willfulness and spite she had displayed before him.
"Will you be my wife, Irene?" repeated her adoring lover.
"I cannot, Mr. Revington. I do not love you," she answered, in a gentler tone than she had used to him before.