There was reconciliation again—­immediate, perfect, all-embracing—­and with it utter happiness.  This would have been a good time to adjourn.  But no, now that the cloud-breeder was revealed at last; now that it was manifest that all the sour weather had come from this girl’s dread that Tracy was lured by her rank and not herself, he resolved to lay that ghost immediately and permanently by furnishing the best possible proof that he couldn’t have had back of him at any time the suspected motive.  So he said: 

“Let me whisper a little secret in your ear—­a secret which I have kept shut up in my breast all this time.  Your rank couldn’t ever have been an enticement.  I am son and heir to an English earl!”

The girl stared at him—­one, two, three moments, maybe a dozen—­then her lips parted: 

“You?” she said, and moved away from him, still gazing at him in a kind of blank amazement.

“Why—­why, certainly I am.  Why do you act like this?  What have I done now?”

“What have you done?  You have certainly made a most strange statement.  You must see that yourself.”

“Well,” with a timid little laugh, “it may be a strange enough statement; but of what consequence is that, if it is true?”

“If it is true.  You are already retiring from it.”

“Oh, not for a moment!  You should not say that.  I have not deserved it.  I have spoken the truth; why do you doubt it?”

Her reply was prompt.

“Simply because you didn’t speak it earlier!”

“Oh!” It wasn’t a groan, exactly, but it was an intelligible enough expression of the fact that he saw the point and recognized that there was reason in it.

“You have seemed to conceal nothing from me that I ought to know concerning yourself, and you were not privileged to keep back such a thing as this from me a moment after—­after—­well, after you had determined to pay your court to me.”

“Its true, it’s true, I know it!  But there were circumstances—­in—­ in the way—­circumstances which—­”

She waved the circumstances aside.

“Well, you see,” he said, pleadingly, “you seemed so bent on our traveling the proud path of honest labor and honorable poverty, that I was terrified—­that is, I was afraid—­of—­of—­well, you know how you talked.”

“Yes, I know how I talked.  And I also know that before the talk was finished you inquired how I stood as regards aristocracies, and my answer was calculated to relieve your fears.”

He was silent a while.  Then he said, in a discouraged way: 

“I don’t see any way out of it.  It was a mistake.  That is in truth all it was, just a mistake.  No harm was meant, no harm in the world.  I didn’t see how it might some time look.  It is my way.  I don’t seem to see far.”

The girl was almost disarmed, for a moment.  Then she flared up again.

“An Earl’s son!  Do earls’ sons go about working in lowly callings for their bread and butter?”