“Forgive me,” he said, in a low voice, but with less self-control, “I came here a poor man; it was necessary to make my bread, and I would have swept offices to do it. I asked nothing and I received”--he smiled with exceeding bitterness--“nothing. Then, unhappily, Judge Hollis found out that I was well-born; he told a few people that I was a gentleman. It was a serious mistake; I have been treated like a dog ever since.” He was thrashing the wayside brush with his stick, and unconsciously beheaded a dozen flowers; they fell at Diana’s feet, but neither of them looked down. “I do not wish to force myself upon your acquaintance, Miss Royall,” he went on, the torrent of pent-up passion unspent. “I understand the reason of your condescension at the ball, but couldn’t you have found a more agreeable way to chastise your cousin? I must have been insufferable?” The intensity of the man’s wounded pride had forced itself upon Diana; she was crimson with mortification, yet she understood him--understood him with a temperamental sympathy that sent a thrill of alarm through her consciousness. “I never knew before how very bad my manners were,” she said simply. He turned and looked at her. All that was womanly and beautiful in her face was crystallized in the colorless atmosphere; her eyes dwelt upon him with a kindness that was at once new and wholly unbearable. “I’m a cub!” he retorted harshly; “how you must hate me!” “On the contrary,” she said very sweetly, “I like you.” Their eyes met with a challenge of angry pride, then a whimsical smile quivered at the corners of her mouth, and she clasped her hands innocently over her ferns. “When you begin to like me we shall be friends,” she said. There was an instant of awkward silence, and then they both laughed, not happily, but with a nervous quiver that suggested hysterical emotion. “I do not know when I began--to dislike you,” he said. “I deserved it from the first, I fancy,” she retorted, hurrying on with her determination to show her repentance; “I have behaved like a snob.” He did not reply; he stooped, instead, to pick up the flowers that he had broken. “My mother would never step on a flower or leave it to die in the road,” he explained simply; “whenever I remember it I pick them up. As a boy I recollect thinking that there was some significance in it, that I must not leave them to die.” Diana looked at him curiously, from under her lashes. What manner of man was he? “It is a sweet thought,” she said, “in a woman--a tenderness of heart.” “Her heart was as tender as her soul was beautiful,” said Caleb Trench; “she died when I was twenty years old.” Diana held out her hand. “Will you give me the flowers?” she asked simply. He gave them with a slight flush of surprise. “They are poor and broken,” he apologized lamely. “I see that you think I have neither a heart nor a soul,” she replied.