"You know him better than that, Penelope! I am ashamed of you! We had read Hynde Horn together ages before Jean Dalziel came; but I imagine, when we came to acting the lines, he thought it would be better to have some other king's daughter; that is, that it would be less personal. And I never, never would have been in the tableau, if I had dared refuse Lady Ardmore, or could have explained; but I had no time to think. And then, naturally, he thought by my being there as the king's daughter that--that--the lions were slain, you know; instead of which they were roaring so that I could hardly hear the orchestra." "Francesca, look me in the eye! Do--you--love him?" "Love him? I adore him!" she exclaimed in good clear decisive English, as she rose impetuously and paced up and down in front of the sofa. "But in the first place there is the difference in nationality." "I have no patience with you. One would think he was a Turk, an Esquimau, or a cannibal. He is white, he speaks English, and he believes in the Christian religion. The idea of calling such a man a foreigner!" "Oh, it didn't prevent me from loving him," she confessed, "but I thought at first it would be unpatriotic to marry him." "Did you think Columbia could not spare you even as a rare specimen to be used for exhibition purposes?" I asked wickedly. "You know I am not so conceited as that! No," she continued ingenuously, "I feared that if I accepted him it would look, over here, as if the home supply of husbands were of inferior quality; and then we had such disagreeable discussions at the beginning, I simply could not bear to leave my nice new free country, and ally myself with his aeons of tiresome history. But it came to me in the night, a week ago, that after all I should hate a man who didn't love his fatherland; and in the illumination of that new idea Ronald's character assumed a different outline in my mind. How could he love America when he had never seen it? How could I convince him that American women are the most charming in the world in any better way than by letting him live under the same roof with a good example? How could I expect him to let me love my country best unless I permitted him to love his best?" "You needn't offer so many apologies for your infatuation, my dear," I answered dryly.