Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/325

Rh that if she dipped so deep into the mere remote overflow her dive into the fount itself would verily be a header. If she drew at such a rate in London how wouldn't she draw at Poughkeepsie? he asked himself, and practically asked Lady Champer; yet bore the strain of the question, without an answer, so nobly that when, with small delay, Poughkeepsie seemed simply to heave with reassurances, he regarded the ground as firm and his tact as rewarded. 'And now at last, dearest,' he said, 'since everything's so satisfactory, you will write?' He put it appealingly, endearingly, yet as if he could scarce doubt.

'Write, love? Why,' she replied, 'I've done nothing but write! I've written ninety letters.'

'But not to mamma,' he smiled.

'Mamma?'—she stared. 'My dear boy, I've not at this time of day to remind you that I've the misfortune to have no mother. I lost mamma, you know, as you lost your father, in childhood. You may be sure,' said Lily Gunton, 'that I wouldn't otherwise have waited for you to prompt me.'

There came into his face a kind of amiable convulsion. 'Of course, darling, I remember—your beautiful mother (she must have been beautiful!) whom I should have been so glad to know. I was thinking of my mamma—who'll be so delighted to hear from you.' The Prince spoke English in perfection—had lived in it from the cradle and appeared, particularly when alluding to his home and family, to matters familiar and of fact, or to those of dress and sport, of general recreation, to draw such a comfort from it as made the girl think of him as scarce more a foreigner than a pleasant, auburn, slightly awkward, slightly slangy, and extremely well-tailored young Briton would have been. He sounded 'mamma' like a rosy English schoolboy; yet just then, for the first time, the things with which he was connected struck her as in a manner strange and far-off. Everything in him, none the less—face and voice and tact, above all his deep desire—laboured to