"We are--we are of that sort!" he declared courageously. "Why should you doubt it, Marcia?"
"I believe yew if yew say so," responded Marcia. "But I guess yew're only fooling me!"
"Fooling you!" Lord Algy was so surprised that he released her quite suddenly from his embrace--so suddenly that she was a little frightened. Was she to lose him, after all?
"Marcia," he continued mildly, yet with a certain manliness that did not ill become him. "I--I hope I am too much of--of a gentleman to--to 'fool' any woman, least of all you, after I have, as you say, compromised you in society by my--my attentions. I--I have very little to offer you--but such as it is, is yours. In--in short, Marcia, I--I will try to make you happy if you can--can care for me enough to--to--marry me!"
Eureka! The game was won! A vision of Masherville Park, Yorkshire, that "well-timbered and highly desirable residence," as the auctioneers would describe it, flitted before Marcia's eyes,--and, filled with triumph, she went straight into her lordly wooer's arms, and kissed him with thorough transatlantic frankness. She was really grateful to him. Ever since she had come to England, she had plotted and schemed to become "my lady" with all the vigor of a purely republican soul,--and now at last, after hard fighting, she had won the prize for which her soul had yearned. She would in future belong to the English aristocracy--that aristocracy which her relatives in New York pretended to despise, yet openly flattered,--and with her arms round the trapped Masherville's neck, she foresaw the delight she would have in being toadied by them as far as toadyism could be made to go.
She is by no means presented to the reader as a favorable type of her nation--for, of course, every one knows there are plenty of sweet, unselfish, guileless American girls, who are absolutely incapable of such unblushing marriage-scheming as hers,--but what else could be expected from Marcia? Her grandfather, the navvy, had but recently become endowed with Pilgrim-Father Ancestry,--and her maternal uncle was a boastful pork-dealer in Cincinnati. It was her bounden duty to ennoble the family somehow,--surely, if any one had a right to be ambitious, she was that one! And wild proud dreams of her future passed through her brain, little Lord Algy quivered meekly under her kiss, and returned it with all the enthusiasm of which he was capable. One or two faint misgivings troubled him as to whether he had not been just a little too hasty in making a serious bona fide offer of marriage to the young lady by whose Pilgrim progenitors he was not deceived. He knew well enough what her antecedents were, and a faint shudder crossed him as he thought of the pork-dealing uncle, who would, by marriage, become his uncle also. He had long been proud of the fact that the house of Masherville had never, through the course of centuries, been associated, even in the remotest manner with trade--and now!-"Yet, after all," he mused, "the Marquis of Londonderry openly advertises himself as a coal-merchant, and the brothers-in-law of the Princess Louise are in the wine trade and stock-broking business,--and all the old knightly blood of England is mingling itself by choice with that of the lowest commoners--what's the use of my remaining aloof, and refusing to go with the spirit of the age? Besides, Marcia loves me, and it's pleasant to be loved!"