o?" she asked him, mechanically. Her mind
roved far afield.

"Rule England!" he told her with gravity.

For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in
the statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his
refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what
would be impossible to him.

She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of
good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before.
"Delightful," she said gayly. "But I'm not sure that I quite understand
the--the precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room
with the project." He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in
which she took him. "Just a whim," he explained. "The things I've got
in mind don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and
men standing about. What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug
little evening with you alone, where I can talk to you and--and we can
be together by ourselves. You'd like it, wouldn't you?"

She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarrassment in her
mantling colour and down-spread lashes. It had always to his eyes been,
from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the
world--exquisitely matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene
yet sensitive grace. But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that
there could come to it, this crowning added loveliness of feminine
confusion.

"You would like it, wouldn't you?" he repeated in a lower, more
strenuous tone.

She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his
shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming.
She swayed rather than stepped toward him.

"I think," she answered, in a musing murmur,--"I think I shall
like--everything."

CHAPTER XXVII

THORPE found the Duke of Glastonbury a much more interesting person
to watch and to talk with, both during the dinner Saturday evening and
later, than he had anticipated.

He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature,
but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had
a distinction of its own. His face, with its little black moustache
and large dark eyes, was fine upon examination, but in some elusively
foreign way. There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked.
His speech was English enough to the ear, it was true, but it was the
considered English of a book, a