Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/194

 *siderably—"I've drawn a big prize in the lottery, and if I let myself be robbed of it by other people's tomfool tricks, I'm a guy, a dead-beat, an out and out dud."

"But don't you see," she urged, laughing a little, although suffering bitterly, "how cruel it would be for them, poor souls? We must think of them a little."

"Why should they come in at all?"

"I really think they ought, poor dears. After all, they stand for something." She recalled their former talk on this vexed subject.

"What do they stand for?—that's the point. They are an inbred lot, a mass of conceit and silly prejudice. I'm sorry to give them away like this, but, after all, they are only very distant relations to whom I owe nothing, and they have a trick of annoying me unspeakably."

"I won't have you say such things." The stern line of a truly adorable mouth was a delight, a challenge. "You are one of them, whether you want to be or whether you don't, and it's your duty to stand by them. Noblesse oblige, you know."

"And that means a scrupulous respect for the feelings of other people, if it means anything. No, let us see things as they are and come down to bedrock." And as the Tenderfoot spoke after this manner, he took a hand of hers in each of his in a fashion at once whimsical, delicate, and loverlike. Somehow he had the power to put an enchantment upon her. "You've got to marry me whatever happens."

"Oh, don't ask me to do that." Black trouble was now in her eyes. "Don't ask me to go where I'm not wanted."

"Certainly you shan't. We can do without Bridport