The duke's chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was. The one he remembered had been another man's wife, a little angel brought up in a convent by white-souled nuns, passed over by her people to an elderly vaurien of great magnificence, and she had sent the strong, laughing, impassioned young English peer away before it was too late, and with the young, young eyes of her looking upward at him in that way which saw “straight into a thing” and with that quiet little voice. So long ago! So long ago! “Ah! Heloise!” he sighed unconsciously. “What did you say?” asked T. Tembarom. The duke came back. “I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty,” he answered. “It was not yesterday nor even the day before. The one I knew died when she was twenty-four.” “Died!” said Tembarom. “Good Lord!” He dropped his head and even changed color. “A fellow can't get on to a thing like that. It seems as if it couldn't happen. Suppose--” he caught his breath hard and then pulled himself up--“Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I've proved what I said--just proved it, and done every single thing she told me to do.” “I am sure you have,” the duke said. “It's because of that I began to say this.” Tembarom spoke hurriedly that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought. “You're a man, and I'm a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you're a man, too. I was crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn't.” The duke's eyes lighted anew. “She had her reasons,” he said. “She laid 'em out as if she'd been my mother instead of a little red-headed angel that you wanted to snatch up and crush up to you so she couldn't breathe. She didn't waste a word. She just told me what I was up against. She'd lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew. She said I'd got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I'd see--beauties that were different from anything I'd ever seen before. And it was up to me to see all of them--the best of them.” “Ladies?” interjected the duke gently. “Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like those in the Ladies' Pictorial. The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!” he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot. “I've seen the whole lot of them; I've done my darndest to get next, and there's not one--” he stopped short. “Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?” he added suddenly. “That was not her point,” remarked the duke. “She wanted you to look at them, and you have looked.” T. Tembarom's eagerness was inspiring to behold.