“Do you know also that if I marry out of my rank and without the consent of Duke Stephen, I shall forfeit all my fortune?”

“‘Cut off without a cent!’” Aleck laughed, but presently paused, embarrassed for the first time since he had begun his plea.  “I, you know, haven’t millions, but there’s a decent income, even for two.  And then I can always go to work and earn something,” he smiled at her, “giving information to a thirsty world about the gill-slit, as you call it.  It would be fun, earning money for you; I’d like to do it.”

Melanie smiled back at him, but left her chair and wandered uneasily about the room, as if turning a difficult matter over in her mind.  Aleck stood by, watching.  Presently she returned to her chair, pushed him gently back into his seat and dropped down beside him.  Before she spoke, she touched her fingers lightly, almost lovingly, along the blue veins of his big hand lying on the arm of the chair.  The hand turned, like a magnet spring, and imprisoned hers.

“No, dear friend, not yet,” said Melanie, drawing away her hand, yet not very quickly after all.  “There is much yet to say to you, and I have been wondering how to say it, but I shall do it now.  Like the heroes in the novels,” she smiled again, “I am going to tell you the story of my life.”

“Good!” said Aleck.  “All ready for chapter one.  But your maid wants you at the door.”

“Go away, Sophie,” said Melanie.  “Serve luncheon to Madame Reynier alone.  I shall wait; and you’ll have to wait, too, poor man!” She looked scrutinizingly at Aleck.  “Or are you, perhaps, hungry?  I’m not going to talk to a hungry man,” she announced.

“Not a bite till I’ve heard chapter thirty-nine!” said Aleck.

In a moment she became serious again.

“I have lived in England and here in America,” she began, “long enough to understand that the differences between your people and mine are more than the differences of language and climate; they are ingrained in our habits of thought, our education, our judgments of life and of people.  My childhood and youth were wholly different from yours, or from what an American girl’s could be; and yet I think I understand your American women, though I suppose I am not in the least like them.

“But I, on the other hand, have seen the dark side of life, and particularly of marriage.  When I was a child I was more important in my own country than I am now, since it seemed then that my father would succeed to the throne.  I was brought up to feel that I was not a woman, but a pawn in the game of politics.  When I had been out of the convent for a year or more, I loved a youth, and was loved in return, but our marriage was laughed at, put aside, declared impossible, because he was of a rank inferior to my own.  My lover disappeared, I know not where or how.  Then affairs changed.  My father died, and it transpired that I had been