'Our home privacy'—how new and sweet and strange the words sounded! A sense of all the three—the novelty, the strangeness, the sweetness—was in the shy brown eyes that looked up and then down; not willing to tell too much. How strange it was, in truth! she thought. Very natural that she should like the privacy, with him to talk to her; but how it should be chosen by him, with only such a wild, wayward, unformed personage as herself,—and again the eyes gave a swift glance, fraught with a little wonder this time. But then the strangeness fell back, and the novelty stood aside, and only the sweetness remained. Eyes might go down, and head bend lower, but lips were treacherous and told it all. The eyes that looked read it, well enough. Yet with a man's wilfulness, drawing Wych Hazel into his arms and bending his face to hers, Rollo asked maliciously, 'Do you love me, Duchess?' 'Well,' said Hazel with demure, 'witchful' face and voice, 'I suppose so. Just a little more than you do me.' Rollo took laughing revenge for this statement, but otherwise did not attempt to combat it. 'Have you worked your way out of the puzzle you were in the morning?' 'It is not a puzzle. It should be, I think, if nobody were head.' 'Ah!' said Rollo, very tenderly, if there was still a spice of mischief in it. 'You have found out then the solution of Dr. Maryland's old paradox—"Love likes her bonds"?' Hazel laughed a little, colouring too. 'No,' she said. 'Love likes you.' 'Comes to the same thing,' said Rollo heartlessly. 'No,' Hazel said again,—'I think I do not like to be made to "stand," any better than the bay. But he does it,—for you.' 'He likes it.' 'In that sense,' said Hazel. 'For you. He has come out of his apprenticeship of fear, and so have I; but you may find hidden stores of wilfulness, yet.' 'I have never been under an apprenticeship of fear,' said Rollo laughing; 'and I am not going to begin now.' 'No,' said Hazel, laughing too. '_You_ were always a master hand. Do you remember when I meant to give up waltzing _for you_—and you would make me do it on compulsion?' CHAPTER XXXIV. GOLD AT INTEREST. 'Papa,' said Primrose a few days after this,—'they are very happy! Duke and his wife, I mean.' 'Yes, my dear, yes,' answered Dr. Maryland; 'they ought to be.' 'Well, papa, they _are;_ and they are happy in the right way. Papa, I was up there to-day, and I saw Jane Best, that little dressmaker Arthur spoke about, who had got broken down with work; Hazel has invited her to come there and rest out, you know, and get well.' 'Yes, my dear, I remember.'