“ Your cousin won’t ask you. She is going to marry Mr. Newman.”
“ Oh, that’s a very different thing!” laughed Lord Deepmere.
“ You would have accepted her , I suppose. That makes me hope that after all you prefer me.”
“ Oh, when things are nice I never prefer one to the other,” said the young Englishman. “I take them all.”
“ Ah, what a horror! I won’t be taken in that way; I must be kept apart,” cried Madame de Bellegarde. “Mr. Newman is much better; he knows how to choose. Oh, he chooses as if he were threading a needle. He prefers Madame de Cintré to any conceivable creature or thing.”
“ Well, you can’t help my being her cousin,” said Lord Deepmere to Newman, with candid hilarity.
“ Oh, no, I can’t help that,” said Newman, laughing back; “neither can she!”
“ And you
