“It makes me very happy that you receive me like this,” he told her simply.  “It makes it so much easier for me to say the things that are in my heart.”

“Won’t you sit down, please?” Maggie invited.  “You are so tall, and I hate to be completely dominated.”

He obeyed at once, but he continued to talk with grave and purposeful seriousness.

“I wish,” he said, “to bring myself entirely into accord, for these few minutes, with your western methods and customs.  I address you, therefore, Lady Maggie, with formal words, while I keep back in my heart much that is struggling to express itself.  I have come to ask you to do me the great honour of becoming my wife.”

Maggie sat for a few moments speechless.  The thing which she had half dreaded and half longed for—­the low timbre of his caressing voice—­was entirely absent.  Yet, somehow or other, his simple, formal words were at least as disturbing.  He leaned towards her, a quiet, dignified figure, anxious yet in a sense confident.  He had the air of a man who has offered to share a kingdom.

“Your wife,” Maggie repeated tremulously.

“The thought is new to you, perhaps,” he went on, with gentle tolerance.  “You have believed the stories people tell that in my youth I was vowed to celibacy and the priesthood.  That is not true.  I have always been free to marry, but although to-day we figure as a great progressive nation, many of the thousand-year-old ideas of ancient China have dwelt in my brain and still sit enshrined in my heart.  The aristocracy of China has passed through evil times.  There is no princess of my own country whom I could meet on equal terms.  So, you see, although it develops differently, there is something of the snobbishness of your western countries reflected in our own ideas.”

“But I am not a princess,” Maggie murmured.

“You are the princess of my soul,” he answered, lowering his eyes for a moment almost reverently.  “I cannot quite hope to make you understand, but if I took for my wife a Chinese lady of unequal mundane rank, I should commit a serious offence against those who watch me from the other side of the grave, and to whom I am accountable for every action of my life.  A lady of another country is a different matter.”

“But I am an Englishwoman,” Maggie said, “and I love my country.  You know what that means.”

“I know very well,” he admitted.  “I had not meant to speak of those things until later, but, for your country’s sake, what greater alliance could you seek to-day than to become the wife of him who is destined to be the Ruler of Asia?”

Maggie caught hold of her courage.  She looked into his eyes unflinchingly, though she felt the hot colour rise into her cheeks.

“You did not speak to me of these things, Prince Shan, when I came to your house last night,” she reminded him.

His smile was full of composure.  It was as though the truth which sat enshrined in the man’s soul lifted him above all the ordinary emotions of fear of misunderstandings.