"I should not presume to advise you; yet it would be a good thing for you, I know. De Vere adores you. He would be your slave, and you would be like a little queen in the position to which his wealth would raise you."
"You make a great deal of wealth," she said, gravely, and waiting curiously for his reply.
"It is a great power in the world," he replied.
"Is it?" she asked. "Ah! Lord Lancaster, 'almost thou persuadest me' to sink to Lady Adela's level and sell myself for gold."
"You seem to have imbibed a strange contempt for Lady Adela," he said.
"I have. Where is her womanliness, her self-respect, that she can lend herself to that wicked old woman's ambitious schemes for buying a coroneted head with her twenty thousand a year? She is the daughter of a hundred earls, and yet she can give herself to you merely for the money's sake. Pah!"
"Need it be merely for the money's sake?" he asked. "Am I repulsive to look upon, Miss West? Is it quite impossible that a woman, Lady Adela or another, should give me her heart with her hand?"
Something like wounded pride quivered in his voice, and he looked at her reproachfully.
"Would it be impossible for me to be loved for myself alone?" he went on, slowly. "Might not some good, true, sweet woman love me for my own self—even as I am?"
She looked up at the handsome face, the large, graceful form, and silently recalled the words Lieutenant De Vere had spoken to her on the steamer's deck that day: