’Of course he has.  But there is nothing to quarrel about if you mean that.  People do not quarrel now about such things.  A girl has to fight her own battle with her own pluck and her own wits.  As with these weapons she is generally stronger than her enemy, she succeeds sometimes although everything else is against her.  I think I am courageous, but his courage beat mine.  I craned at the first fence.  When he was willing to swallow my bait, my hand was not firm enough to strike the hook in his jaws.  Had I not quailed then I think I should have-"had him".’

‘It is horrid to hear you talk like this.’  She was leaning over from her seat, looking black as she was, so much older than her wont, with something about her of the unworldly serious thoughtfulness which a mourning always gives.  And yet her words were so worldly, so unfeminine!

’I have got to tell the truth to somebody.  It was so, just as I have said.  Of course I did not love him.  How could I love him after what has passed?  But there need have been nothing much in that.  I don’t suppose that Duke’s eldest sons often get married for love.’

‘Miss Boncassen loves him.’

’I dare say the beggar’s daughter loved King Cophetua.  When you come to distances such as that, there can be love.  The very fact that a man should have descended so far in the quest of beauty,—­ the flattery of it alone,—­will produce love.  When the angels came after the daughters of men of course the daughters of men loved them.  The distance between him and me is not great enough to have produced that sort of worship.  There was no reason why Lady Mabel Grex should not be good enough wife for the son of the Duke of Omnium.’

‘Certainly not.’

’And therefore I was not struck, as by the shining of la light from heaven.  I cannot say that I loved him, Frank,—­I am beyond worshipping even an angel from heaven.’

‘Then I do not know that you can blame him,’ he said very seriously.

’Just so;—­and as I have chosen to be honest I have told him everything.  But I had my revenge first.’

‘I would have said nothing.’

’You would have recommended—­delicacy!  No doubt you think that women should be delicate let them suffer what they may.  A woman should not let it be known that she has any human nature in her.  I had him on the hip, and for a moment I used my power.  He had certainly done me a wrong.  He had asked for my love,—­and with the delicacy which you commend, I had not at once grasped at all that such a request conveyed.  Then, as he told me so frankly, he “changed his mind”!  Did he not wrong me?’

‘He should not have raised false hopes.’

’He told me that—­he had changed his mind.  I think I loved him then as nearly as I ever did,—­because he looked me full in the face.  Then,—­I told him that I had never cared for him, and that he need have nothing on his conscience.  But I doubt whether he was glad to hear it.  Men are so vain!  I have talked too much about myself.  And so you are to be the Duke’s son-in-law.  And she will have hundreds of thousands.’