‘So that he does not look coldly, I do not care how others may look,’ said Caroline proudly.

’But when he finds that he has injured himself by such a marriage in the estimation of all his friends, how will it be then?’

This set Caroline Spalding thinking of what she was doing.  She began to realise the feeling that perhaps she might not be a fit bride for an English lord’s son, and in her agony she came to Nora Rowley for counsel.  After all, how little was it that she knew of the home and the country to which she was to be carried!  She might not, perhaps, get adequate advice from Nora, but she would probably learn something on which she could act.  There was no one else among the English at Florence to whom she could speak with freedom.  When she mentioned her fears to her aunt, her aunt of course laughed at her.  Mrs Spalding told her that Mr Glascock might be presumed to know his own business best, and that she, as an American lady of high standing—­the niece of a minister!—­was a fitting match for any Englishman, let him be ever so much a lord.  But Caroline was not comforted by this, and in her suspense she went to Nora Rowley.  She wrote a line to Nora, and when she called at the hotel, was taken up to her friend’s bedroom.  She found great difficulty in telling her story, but she did tell it.  ’Miss Rowley,’ she said, ’if this is a silly thing that he is going to do, I am bound to save him from his own folly.  You know your own country better than I do.  Will they think that he has disgraced himself?’

‘Certainly not that,’ said Nora.

’Shall I be a load round his neck?  Miss Rowley, for my own sake I would not endure such a position as that, not even though I love him.  But for his sake!  Think of that.  If I find that people think ill of him because of me!’

‘No one will think ill of him.’

’Is it esteemed needful that such a one as he should marry a woman of his own rank.  I can bear to end it all now; but I shall not be able to bear his humiliation, and my own despair, if I find that I have injured him.  Tell me plainly, is it a marriage that he should not make?’ Nora paused for a while before she answered, and as she sat silent the other girl watched her face carefully.  Nora on being thus consulted, was very careful that her tongue should utter nothing that was not her true opinion as best she knew how to express it.  Her sympathy would have prompted her to give such an answer as would at once have made Caroline happy in her mind.  She would have been delighted to have been able to declare that these doubts were utterly groundless, and this hesitation needless.  But she conceived that she owed it as a duty from one woman to another to speak the truth as she conceived it on so momentous an occasion, and she was not sure but that Mr Glascock would be considered by his friends in England to be doing badly in marrying an American girl.  What she did not remember was this that her very hesitation was in fact an answer, and such an answer as she was most unwilling to give.  ‘I see that it would be so,’ said Caroline Spalding.