it
into the talk as if it were of no particular validity, but only
interesting as one chose to take it.

"Ah! that's why you came!"

"I saw him two weeks ago, in Milan. He was greatly troubled. I had to
own that you had left Paris without seeing me, without even telling me
your whereabouts."

"Then--" said Rose.

She knew what else had happened. The prince had urged, "Go over to
America. Influence her. Bring her back with you." But this she did not
say. The unbroken cordiality of his attitude always made his best
defense. If she had ever known harshness from him, she might brave it
again. But many forces between them were as yet unmeasured. She did not
dare.

"You must remember," he said, with the air of talking over reasonably
something to which he was not even persuading her, "the prince is
exceptionally placed. He could give you a certain position."

"I have a certain position now. Don't forget that, will you?" She seemed
to speak from an extremity of distaste.

"He offers a private marriage. He is not likely to set it aside; the
elder line is quite assured, so far as anything can be in this world.
Besides"--he looked at her winningly--"you believe in love. He loves
you."

"I did believe in it," she said haltingly, as if the words were
difficult. "I should find it hard now to tell what I believe."

"Well!" He took off his hat to invite the summer breeze. It stirred the
hair above his noble forehead, and Rose, in a sickness at old affection
dead, knew, without glancing at him, how he looked, and marveled that
any one so admirably made could seem to her so persistently ranged with
evil forces. Yet, she reflected, it was only because he arrogated power
to himself. He put his hands upon the wheels of life and jarred them.

"Well! I believe in it. Isn't that enough for you?"

"Not now, not now!" She had to answer, though it might provoke stern
issues. "Once it would have been. There is nothing you could have told
me that I would not have believed. But you delivered me over to the
snare of the fowler." Grandmother had read those words in her morning
chapter, and they had stayed in her ears as meaning precisely this
thing. He had known that it was a snare, and he had cast her into it.
She turned her moved face upon him. "We mustn't talk about these things.
Nobody knows where it will end. And you mustn't talk to me about the
prince."

"If it doesn't mean anything to you, wouldn't it move you if I told you
i