She looked up at him with her frank, beaming regard. "Because they dare to misjudge you, and they know nothing, and are not worthy to know anything of your real self."
He pressed his lips together as if in bodily pain. "And what do you know?"
"Have you not yourself said that you talk to me as you talk to no one else?" answered Nina, impetuously; "besides—I cannot tell why, but the first day I met you I seemed to find some friend that I had lost before. I was certain that you would never misconstrue anything I said, and I felt that I saw further into your heart and mind than any one else could do. Was it not very strange?" She stopped, and looked up at him. Ernest bent his eyes on the ground, and breathed fast.
"No, no," he said at last; "yours is only an ideal of me. If you knew me as I really am, you would cease to feel the—the interest that you say——"
He stopped abruptly; facile as he was at pretty compliments, and versed in tender scenes as he had been from his school-days, the longing to make this girl love him, and his struggle not to breathe love to her, deprived him of his customary strength and nonchalance.
"I do not fear to know you as you are," said Nina, gently. "I do not think you yourself allow all the better things that there are in you. People have not judged you rightly, and you have been too proud to prove their error to them. You have found pleasure in running counter to the prudish and illiberal bigots who presumed to judge you; and to a world you have found heartless and false you have not cared to lift the domino and mask you wore."
Vaughan sighed from the bottom of his heart, and walked on in silence for a good five minutes. "Promise me, Nina," he said at length with an effort, "that no matter what you hear against me, you will not condemn me unheard."
"I promise," she answered, raising her eyes to his, brighter still for the color in her checks. It was the first time he had called her Nina.
"Miss Gordon," said Eusebius, hurriedly overtaking them, "pray come with me a moment: there is the most exquisite specimen of the Flamboyant style in an archway——"
"Thank you for your good intentions," said Nina, pettishly, "but really, as you might know by this time, I never can see any attractions in your prosaic and matter-of-fact-fact study."