"His mother was a cousin of Lady Vaughan's. He is rich, clever, and I should certainly say, as quiet and uninteresting as nearly all the rest of the world. If it were not so, he would not have been reserved for me." "I do not quite understand," said Claude Lennox. "How it is? Was there a contract between your parents?" "No," she replied, with a slight tone of scorn in her voice--"there is never anything of that kind except in novels. I am Lady Vaughan's granddaughter, and she has a large fortune to leave; this Adrian Darcy is also her relative, and she says the best thing to be done for us is to marry each other, and then her fortune can come to us." "Is that all?" he inquired, with a look of great relief. "You need not marry him unless you choose. Have you seen him?" "No; nor do I wish to see him. Any one whom Lady Vaughan likes cannot possibly suit me. Oh, Claude, how I dread it all!--even the journey to Germany." "I should have fancied that, longing as you do for change and excitement, the journey would have pleased you," observed Claude. She looked at him with a half-wistful expression on her beautiful face. "I must be very wicked," she said; "indeed I know that I am. I should be looking forward to it with rapture, if any one young or amusing were going with me; but to sit in closed carriages with Sir Arthur and Lady Vaughan--to travel, yet see nothing--is dreadful." "But you are attached to them," he said--"you are fond of them, are you not, Hyacinth?" "Yes," she replied, piteously; "I should love them very much if they did not make me so miserable. They are over sixty, and I am just eighteen--they have forgotten what it is to be young, and force me to live as they do. I am very unhappy." She bent her beautiful face over the flowers, and he saw her eyes fill with tears. "It is a hard lot," he said; "but there is one remedy, and only one. Do you love me, Hyacinth?" She looked at him with something of childish perplexity in her face. "I do not know," she replied. "Yes, you do know, Hyacinth; you know if you love me well enough to marry me." No blush rose to her face, her eyes did not droop as they met his, the look of perplexity deepened in them. "I cannot tell," she returned. "In the first place, I am not sure that I know really what love means. Lady Vaughan will not allow such a word in her presence; I have no young girl friends to come to me with their secrets; I am not allowed to read stories or poetry--how can I tell you whether I love you or not?" "Surely your own heart has a voice, and you know what it says." "Has it?" she rejoined indifferently. "If it has a voice, that voice has not yet spoken." "Do not say so, Hyacinth; you know how dearly I love you. I am lingering here when I ought to be far away, hoping almost against hope to win you. Do not tell me that all my love, my devotion, my pleading, my prayers have been in vain."