Page:Penelope's Progress.djvu/264

250 "Of course. Well?" "He had told me a week before that he should go away for a while, that it made him too wretched to stay here just now; and I suppose that was when he got the silver wand ready for me. It was meant for the Jean of the poem, you know. Of course he would not put my own name on a gift like that."

"You don't think he had it made for Jean Dalziel in the first place?" I asked this, thinking she needed some sort of tonic in her relaxed condition.

"You know him better than that, Penelope! I am ashamed of you! We had read Hynde Horn together ages before Jean Dalziel came; but I imagine, when we came to acting the lines, he thought it would be better to have some other king's daughter; that is, that it would be less personal. And I never, never would have been in the tableau, if I had dared refuse Lady Ardmore, or could have explained; but I had no time to think. And then, naturally, he thought by my being there as the king's daughter that—that—the lions were slain, you know; instead of which they were roaring so that I could hardly hear the orchestra."

"Francesca, look me in the eye! Do—you—love him?" "Love him? I adore him!" she exclaimed in good clear decisive English, as she rose