"Nothing. As long as I am worthy of you in your eyes, what others think or say is nothing to me. I honor you too much to make the gauge between us a third person's opinion; or measure you or myself by a few stops higher or lower in the social ladder. Your sister thinks me below you in rank, soit! She is right; I am quite ready to admit it; but that I am your equal in all that makes men and women equal in the sight of Heaven, I know. When she finds me unworthy of you in thought or deed, then she may call me beneath you—not till then."
Her cheeks were flushed; he could hear her quick breathings, and in her vehemence and haughty indignation she picked the petals of her bouquet de corsage to pieces and flung them away. Another time he would have thought how well her pride became her, and given her some fond reply. Just now the thorn rankled as Lady Clive had hoped, and he answered her gravely, in the tone which it was as unwise to use to her as to prick a thorough-bred colt with both spurs.
"You are quite right. Were I a king, you would be my equal as long as your heart was mine, your mind as noble, and your character as unsullied as I hope them to be now."
She turned on him rapidly with the first indignant look she had ever given to him.
"Hope! You might say know, I think!"
"I would have said 'know,' and meant it too, yesterday."
"Yesterday? What do you mean? Why am I less worthy your confidence to-day than yesterday?"
She looked wonderingly at him, her eyes full of inquiry and bewilderment. It was marvellous acting, if it was acting; yet he thought she could scarcely have so soon forgotten their scene in the anteroom the previous night. They had now come into the salon; he left her side and walked to the mantel-piece, leaning his arm on it, and speaking coldly, as he had never done to her since they first met.
"Beatrice, do not attempt to act with me. You cannot have forgotten what we said in the anteroom last night. Nothing assumed ever deceives me, and you only lower yourself in my estimation."
She clinched her hands till the rings he had given her crushed together.