Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/326

318 bring them near and make them natural. This was intensely the case as he went on: 'Such a little letter as you might send would really be awfully jolly.'

'My dear child,' Lily replied on quick reflection, 'I'll write to her with joy the minute I hear from her. Won't she write to me?'

The Prince just visibly flushed. 'In a moment if you'll only'

'Write to her first?'

'Just pay her a little—no matter how little—your respects.'

His attenuation of the degree showed perhaps a sense of a weakness of position; yet it was no perception of this that made the girl immediately say: Oh, caro, I don't think I can begin. If you feel that she won't—as you evidently do—is it because you've asked her and she has refused?' The next moment, 'I see you have!' she exclaimed. His rejoinder to this was to catch her in his arms, to press his cheek to hers, to murmur a flood of tender words in which contradiction, confession, supplication, and remonstrance were oddly confounded; but after he had sufficiently disengaged her to allow her to speak again, his effusion was checked by what came. 'Do you really mean you can't induce her?' It renewed itself on the first return of ease; or it, more correctly perhaps, in order to renew itself, took this return—a trifle too soon—for granted. Singular, for the hour, was the quickness with which ease could leave them—so blissfully at one as they were; and, to be brief, it had not come back even when Lily spoke of the matter to Lady Champer. It is true that she waited but little to do so. She then went straight to the point. 'What would you do if his mother doesn't write?'

'The old Princess—to you?' Her ladyship had not had time to mount guard in advance over the tone of this, which was doubtless (as she instantly, for that matter, herself became aware) a little too much that of 'Have you really expected she would?' What Lily had expected found itself