"And I particularly wished to be alone here with you, or I wouldn't have followed when you _had_ slipped away from them," he broke in. "Oh, Miss Destrey--my Madeleine, you must listen to me. There could be no place in the world more appropriate to the tale of a man's love for a woman than this, where a man and woman died for love of one another." "I thought you called all this 'nonsense'?" I cut him short. "No, Prince, neither here nor anywhere must you speak of love to me, for I don't love you, and never could." "I know that you mean to shut yourself away from the world," he interrupted me again. "But you shall not. It would be sacrilege. You--the most beautiful, the most womanly girl in the world--to--" "No more, please!" I cried. "It doesn't matter what my future is to be, for you will not be in it. I--" "I must be in it. I adore you. I can't give you up. Haven't you seen from the first how I loved you?" "I _thought_ I saw you liked trying to flirt when no one was looking. That sounds rather horrid, but--it's the truth." "You misjudged me cruelly. Have you no human ambition? I could place you among the highest in any land. With me, your beauty should shine as it never could in your own country. Is it nothing to you that I can make you a Princess?" "Less than nothing," I answered, "though perhaps it would be pretty of me to thank you for wanting to make me one. So I do thank you; and I'll thank you still more if you will go now, and leave me to my thoughts." "I cannot go till I have made you understand how I love you, how indispensable you are to me," he persisted. And I grew really angry; for he had no right to persecute me, when I had refused him. "Very well, then, _I_ shall go," I said, and would have passed him, but he seized my hand and held it fast. It was this moment that Mr. Barrymore chose for paying his respects to Juliet's tomb; and I blushed as I have never blushed in my life, I think--blushed till the tears smarted in my eyes. I was afraid he would believe that I'd been letting Prince Dalmar-Kalm make love to me. But there was nothing to say, unless I were willing to have a scene, and that would have been hateful. Nor was there anything to do except the obvious thing, snatch my hand away; and that might seem to be only because some one had come. But how I should have loved to box the Prince's ears! I never dreamed that I had such a temper. I suppose, though, there must be something of the fishwife in every woman--something that comes boiling up to the surface once in a while, and makes _noblesse oblige_ hard to remember.