her lofty height with the lieutenant, smiled, chatted, even sang to him by moonlight, one night, in a voice as sweet as her face. But she was very shy, very quiet with the man whose business it was to convey her to England. She tried faithfully to be as little of "a bore and nuisance" as possible.

It did not matter; indeed, it was much better so, he told himself, and yet he chafed sometimes under her peculiar manner. He did not like to be treated wholly with indifference, did not like to be entirely ignored, as if she had forgotten him completely.

So one day when De Vere lolled in his state-room, he[Pg 60] went and stood behind her chair where she sat reading. It was one of the poets of his own land whose book she held in her hand, and the fact emboldened him to say:

[Pg 60]

"You like English authors, Miss West. Do you think you shall like England?"

She lifted the blue-gray eyes calmly to his face.

"No," she replied, concisely.

He flushed a little. It was his own native land. He did not like to hear her say she should not like it.

"That is a pity, since you are going to make your home there," he said.

"I am not at all sure of that," she answered, putting her white forefinger between the pages of her book, and turning squarely round to look at him as he talked. "Perhaps if I can not bring myself to like England, I may persuade my aunt to come to America with me."

"Lady Lancaster would die of chagrin if you did," he replied, hastily.

He saw a blush color the smooth cheek, and wished that he had thought before he spoke.

"She is poor and proud. She does not like to be reminded that her aunt is a servant at Lancaster Park," he said, pityingly, to himself.

And he recalled De Vere's intentions with a sensation of generous pleasure. Leonora, with her fair face and her cultured mind, would be lifted by her marriage into the sphere where she rightly belonged. Then she would like England better.

"I have been reading your poet laureate," she said. "I was much struck by these lines:

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