Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/78

SOPHY OF KRAVONIA "No, no," she answered, "I have no fear. What is it, Casimir, that drives us on?"

"Drives us on! You! You, too?"

"It's not a woman's part, is it?"

He caught her round the waist, and she allowed his clasp. But she grew grave, yet smiled again softly.

"If all life were an evening at Fontainebleau—a fine evening at Fontainebleau!" she murmured, in the low clearness which marked her voice.

"Mightn't it be?"

"With war? And with what drives us on?"

He sighed, and his sigh puzzled her.

"Oh, well," she cried, "at least you know I'm Sophy Grouch, and my father was as mean as the man who opens your lodge-gate."

The sky had gone a blue-black. A single star sombrely announced the coming pageant.

"And his daughter high as the hopes that beckon me to my career!"

"You've a wonderful way of talking," smiled Sophy Grouch—simple Essex in contact with Paris at that instant.

"You'll be my wife, Sophie?"

"I don't think Lady Meg will keep me long. Pharos is working hard so Marie Zerkovitch declares. I should bring you a dot of two thousand five hundred francs!"

"Do you love me?"

The old question rang clear in the still air. Who has not heard it of women—or uttered it of men? Often so easy, sometimes so hard. When all is right save one thing—or when all is wrong save one thing—then it is hard to answer, and may have been hard to ask. With Casimir there was no doubt, save the 60