However, my lord, nothing daunted, expressed himself monstrously glad to hear it; monstrously glad.  And after looking about him and humming and hawing, ‘Won’t you sit?’ he said, with a killing glance.

‘I am leaving immediately,’ Julia answered, and declined with coldness the chair which he pushed forward.  At another time his foppish dress might have moved her to smiles, or his feebleness and vapid oaths to pity.  This morning she needed her pity for herself, and was in no smiling mood.  Her world had crashed around her; she would sit and weep among the ruins, and this butterfly insect flitted between.  After a moment, as he did not speak, ‘I will not detain your lordship,’ she continued, curtseying frigidly.

‘Cruel beauty!’ my lord answered, dropping his hat and clasping his hands in an attitude.  And then, to her astonishment, ‘Look, ma’am,’ he cried with animation, ’look, I beseech you, on the least worthy of your admirers and deign to listen to him.  Listen to him while—­and don’t, oh, I say, don’t stare at me like that,’ he continued hurriedly, plaintiveness suddenly taking the place of grandiloquence.  ’I vow and protest I am in earnest.’

‘Then you must be mad!’ Julia cried in great wrath.  ’You can have no other excuse, sir, for talking to me like that!’

‘Excuse!’ he cried rapturously.  ’Your eyes are my excuse, your lips, your shape!  Whom would they not madden, ma’am?  Whom would they not charm—­insanitate—­intoxicate?  What man of sensibility, seeing them at an immeasurable distance, would not hasten to lay his homage at the feet of so divine, so perfect a creature, whom even to see is to taste of bliss!  Deign, madam, to—­Oh, I say, you don’t mean to say you are really of—­offended?’ Lord Almeric stuttered in amazement, again falling lamentably from the standard of address which he had conned while his man was shaving him.  ‘You—­you—­look here—­’

‘You must be mad!’ Julia cried, her eyes flashing lightning on the unhappy beau.  ’If you do not leave me, I will call for some one to put you out!  How dare you insult me?  If there were a bell I could reach—­’

Lord Almeric stared in the utmost perplexity; and fallen from his high horse, alighted on a kind of dignity.  ‘Madam,’ he said with a little bow and a strut, ’’tis the first time an offer of marriage from one of my family has been called an insult!  And I don’t understand it.  Hang me!  If we have married fools, we have married high!’

It was Julia’s turn to be overwhelmed with confusion.  Having nothing less in her mind than marriage, and least of all an offer of marriage from such a person, she had set down all he had said to impudence and her unguarded situation.  Apprised of his meaning, she experienced a degree of shame, and muttered that she had not understood; she craved his pardon.

‘Beauty asks and beauty has!’ Lord Almeric answered, bowing and kissing the tips of his fingers, his self-esteem perfectly restored.