?"--I
asked this, thinking she needed some sort of tonic in her relaxed
condition.

"You know him better than that, Penelope! I am ashamed of you! We had
read Hynde Horn together ages before Jean Dalziel came; but I imagine,
when we came to acting the lines, he thought it would be better to have
some other king's daughter; that is, that it would be less personal.
And I never, never would have been in the tableau, if I had dared refuse
Lady Ardmore, or could have explained; but I had no time to think. And
then, naturally, he thought by me being there as the king's daughter
that--that--the lions were slain, you know; instead of which they were
roaring so that I could hardly hear the orchestra."

"Francesca, look me in the eye! Do--you--love him?"

"Love him? I adore him!" she exclaimed in good clear decisive English,
as she rose impetuously and paced up and down in front of the sofa. "But
in the first place there is the difference in nationality."

"I have no patience with you. One would think he was a Turk, an
Esquimau, or a cannibal. He is white, he speaks English, and he believes
in the Christian religion. The idea of calling such a man a foreigner!"

"Oh, it didn't prevent me from loving him," she confessed, "but I
thought at first it would be unpatriotic to marry him."

"Did you think Columbia could not spare you even as a rare specimen to
be used for exhibition purposes?" I asked wickedly.

"You know I am not so conceited as that! No," she continued ingenuously,
"I feared that if I accepted him it would look, over here, as if the
home-supply of husbands were of inferior quality; and then we had such
disagreeable discussions at the beginning, I simply could not bear
to leave my nice new free country, and ally myself with his aeons of
tiresome history. But it came to me in the night, a week ago, that
after all I should hate a man who didn't love his Fatherland; and in
the illumination of that new idea Ronald's character assumed a different
outline in my mind. How could he love America when he had never seen it?
How could I convince him that American women are the most charming in
the world in any better way than by letting him live under the same roof
with a good example? How could I expect him to let me love my country
best unless I permitted him to love his best?"

"You needn't offer so many apologies for your infatuation, my dear," I
answered dryly.

"I am not apologising for it!" she exclaimed impulsivel