"She is your mother," he interposed, kindly. "Don't think that I am ungrateful enough to forget that."
She took his arm, and looked at him with all her heart in her eyes. "Come into a quieter room," she whispered.
Romayne led her away. Neither of them noticed Penrose as they left the room.
He had not moved since Stella had spoken to him. There he remained in his corner, absorbed in thought--and not in happy thought, as his face would have plainly betrayed to any one who had cared to look at him. His eyes sadly followed the retiring figures of Stella and Romayne. The color rose on his haggard cheeks. Like most men who are accustomed to live alone, he had the habit, when he was strongly excited, of speaking to himself. "No," he said, as the unacknowledged lovers disappeared through the door, "it is an insult to ask me to do it!" He turned the other way, escaped Lady Loring's notice in the reception-room, and left the house.
Romayne and Stella passed through the card-room and the chess-room, turned into a corridor, and entered the conservatory.
For the first time the place was a solitude. The air of a newly-invented dance, faintly audible through the open windows of the ballroom above, had proved an irresistible temptation. Those who knew the dance were eager to exhibit themselves. Those who had only heard of it were equally anxious to look on and learn. Even toward the latter end of the nineteenth century the youths and maidens of Society can still be in earnest--when the object in view is a new dance.
What would Major Hynd have said if he had seen Romayne turn into one of the recesses of the conservatory, in which there was a seat which just held two? But the Major had forgotten his years and his family, and he too was one of the spectators in the ballroom.
"I wonder," said Stella, "whether you know how I feel those kind words of yours when you spoke of my mother. Shall I tell you?"
She put her arm round his neck and kissed him. He was a man new to love, in the nobler sense of the word. The exquisite softness in the touch of her lips, the delicious fragrance of her breath, intoxicated him. Again and again he returned the kiss. She drew back; she recovered her self-possession with a suddenness and a certainty incomprehensible to a man. From the depths of tenderness she passed to the shallows of frivolity. In her own defense she was almost as superficial as her mother, in less than a moment.
"What would Mr. Penrose say if he saw you?" she whispered.
"Why do you speak of Penrose? Have you seen him to-night?"
"Yes--looking sadly out of his element, poor man. I did my best to set him at his ease--because I know you like him."
"Dear Stella!"
"No, not again! I am speaking seriously now. Mr. Penrose looked at me with a strange kind of interest--I can't describe it. Have you taken him into our confidence?"
"He is so devoted--he has such a true interest in me," said Romayne--"I really felt ashamed to treat him like a stranger. On our journey to London I did own that it was your charming letter which had decided me on returning. I did say, 'I must tell her myself how well she has understood me, and how deeply I feel her kindness.' Penrose took my hand, in his gentle, considerate way. 'I understand you, too,' he said--and that was all that passed between us."
"Nothing more, since that time?"
"Nothing."
"Not a word of what we said to each other when we were alone last week in the picture gallery?"
"Not a word. I am self-tormentor enough to distrust myself, even now. God knows I have concealed nothing from you; and yet-- Am I not selfishly thinking of my own happiness, Stella, when I ought to be thinking only of you? You know, my angel, with what a life you must associate yourself if you marry me. Are you really sure tha t you have love enough and courage enough to be my wife?"
She rested her head caressingly on his shoulder, and looked up at him with her charming smile.
"How many times must I say it," she asked, "before you will believe me? Once more--I have love enough and courage enough to be your wife; and I knew it, Lewis, the first time I saw you! Will that confession satisfy your scruples? And will you promise never again to doubt yourself or me?"
Romayne promised, and sealed the promise--unresisted this time--with a kiss. "When are we to be married?" he whispered.
She lifted her head from his shoulder with a sigh. "If I am to answer you honestly," she replied, "I must speak of my mother, before I speak of myself."
Romayne submitted to the duties of his new position, as well as he understood them. "Do you mean that you have told your mother of our engagement?" he said. "In that case, is it my duty or yours--I am very ignorant in these matters--to consult her wishes? My own idea is, that I ought to ask her if she approves of me as her son-in-law, and that you might then speak to her of the marriage."
Stella thought of Romayne's tastes, all in favor of modest retirement, and of her mother's tastes, all in favor of ostentation and display. She frankly owned the result produced in her own mind. "I am afraid to consult my mother about our marriage, " she said.
Romayne looked astonished. "Do you think Mrs. Eyrecourt will disapprove of it?" he asked.
Stella was equally astonished on her side. "Disapprove of it?" she repeated. "I know for certain that my mother will be delighted."
"Then where is the difficulty?"
There was but one way of definitely answering that question. Stella boldly described her mother's idea of a wedding--including the Archbishop, the twelve bridesmaids in green and gold, and the hundred guests at breakfast in Lord Loring's picture gallery. Romayne's consternation literally deprived him, for the moment, of the power of speech. To say that he looked at Stella, as a prisoner in "the condemned cell" might have looked at the sheriff, announcing the morning of his execution, would be to do injustice to the prisoner. He receives his shock without flinching; and, in proof of his composure, celebrates his wedding with the gallows by a breakfast which he will not live to digest.
"If you think as your mother does," Romayne began, as soon as he had recovered his self-possession, "no opinion of mine shall stand in the way--" He could get no further. His vivid imagination saw the Archbishop and the bridesmaids, heard the hundred guests and their dreadful speeches: his voice faltered, in spite of himself.
Stella eagerly relieved him. "My darling, I don't think as my mother does," she interposed, tenderly. "I am sorry to say we have very few sympathies in common. Marriages, as I think, ought to be celebrated as privately as possible--the near and dear relations present, and no one else. If there must be rejoicings and banquets, and hundreds of invitations, let them come when the wedded pair are at home after the honeymoon, beginning life in earnest. These are odd ideas for a woman to have--but they are my ideas, for all that."
Romayne's face brightened. "How few women possess your fine sense and your delicacy of feeling!" he exclaimed "Surely your mother must give way, when she hears we are both of one mind about our marriage."
Stella knew her mother too well to share the opinion thus expressed.