And then Lord Lambeth, touching his hat a little, shook hands with Bessie.
"Fancy your being here!" he said. He was blushing and smiling;
he looked very handsome, and he had a kind of splendor that he had
not had in America. Bessie Alden's imagination, as we know,
was just then in exercise; so that the tall young Englishman,
as he stood there looking down at her, had the benefit of it.
"He is handsomer and more splendid than anything I have ever seen,"
she said to herself. And then she remembered that he was a marquis,
and she thought he looked like a marquis.

"I say, you know," he cried, "you ought to have let a man know
you were here!"

"I wrote to you an hour ago," said Mrs. Westgate.

"Doesn't all the world know it?" asked Bessie, smiling.

"I assure you I didn't know it!" cried Lord Lambeth.
"Upon my honor I hadn't heard of it. Ask Woodley now;
had I, Woodley?"

"Well, I think you are rather a humbug," said Willie Woodley.

"You don't believe that--do you, Miss Alden?" asked his lordship.
"You don't believe I'm a humbug, eh?"

"No," said Bessie, "I don't."

"You are too tall to stand up, Lord Lambeth," Mrs. Westgate observed.
"You are only tolerable when you sit down. Be so good as to get a chair."