“He is, indeed. You haven’t even seen him, and you cannot, therefore, understand. Hilary, he _hates_ me, and until this morning I have never been able to understand why, or why, try as I might to like him, and to feel dutifully toward him, a cold shudder of dislike creeps over me when he comes near. Last night he grew furiously angry with me because I refused to marry Lord Carthew, and he told me then for the first time, with the idea, I suppose, of humiliating me, that my dear mamma was not my mother at all, but that I was really the daughter of an ignorant gypsy woman. It seemed too strange to be believed, but it was all true. This morning at six o’clock I climbed out of my bedroom window, as he had locked me into my room, and came here to borrow a horse with which to find out Dr. Netherbridge at Grayling. He confirmed Sir Philip’s words. The first Lady Cranstoun was a lovely gypsy girl, brought up on charity by Sir Philip’s sister, with whom he fell in love, and made a most wretched marriage. Not many days before I was born, my mother, heart-broken at the treatment she received, ran back to her own people, and among them, in a tumble-down little cottage not far from here, I was born, eighteen and a half years ago. So now you understand,” she concluded, triumphantly, “that so far from being a great lady, I come from the class of people who are driven from town to town by the police, branded as thieves and poachers, with the band of every respectable man and woman against them.” She spoke bitterly, and something in her words and tone shocked Hilary a little. He had none of the love for the original and the unexpected in woman which had probably come to Lord Carthew from his brilliant little American mother. Hilary’s mother was the pretty and graceful daughter of a country clergyman, who had in her youth revelled in lawn-tennis and crewel-work, and whose ideas on all subjects were equally orthodox and limited. Hilary was fond of his mother, and she had heretofore supplied his ideal of femininity; he had not yet had time to adjust his aspirations toward a different standard. “Do you quite realize what you are doing, I wonder?” he asked her suddenly, turning and taking her face into his hand while he scrutinized it closely, with a half-angry, half-hungry look. “What you are doing, I mean, in throwing over a man like Carthew for the sake of a man like me? He is heir to an earldom; his father is well off, and in a very brilliant position; his mother is extremely wealthy; he distinguished himself so greatly at college that people expect great things of him. While, as for me, the higher education was wasted on me; I was never good for anything but athletics. I am leaving England to rough it in Canada, trying to make a farm pay. I can keep a wife, certainly, upon what I have, but not such a wife as you.” “Don’t you want me?” she asked, simply, looking him straight in the eyes.