Rosemary Fowkes, walking beside him in her irreproachably cut tailor-made looked like a young Diana, radiant with youth and health. Her skin, her eyes, her hair, the jaunty little hat she wore, the trim shoes and neat silk stockings appeared strangely out of harmony with the stooping figure of this disillusioned man of the world, with that vague air of Buckingham Palace about his grey frock coat and silk hat.
It was whilst walking through the park that Rosemary spoke to her fiancé about Naniescu's proposal. Jasper listened attentively and without interrupting her, until she herself paused, obviously waiting for him to speak. Then he said:
"And you have fallen in with General Naniescu's views?"
"Yes!" she replied, after an instant's hesitation. "The whole thing appeals to me very much, and I am flattered by the confidence which the Roumanian Government apparently has in my judgment. And of course," she added, "I am not bound in any way." "Have you made any definite promises to Naniescu?"
"Not quite definite. I wanted first of all to consult your wishes."
"Oh, my dear!" Tarkington interjected, and for one instant a light of youth and folly illumined his tired eyes. "Did I not promise you when you made me so immeasurably happy that you should be absolutely free to follow your career in whatever manner you choose? I am far too proud of you to wish to hamper you in any way."
"You have always been the dearest, kindest, most considerate creature on God's earth," Rosemary rejoined, and in her eyes there came a look so soft, so tender, so womanly that the man on whom it fell hardly dared to meet it. "But you are not forgetting, are you, Jasper," she went on earnestly, "that politically we don't always see eye to eye, you and I?"
"So long as we see eye to eye in other things," he said, "what does it matter? When I asked you, my dear, to be my wife, I knew that I would not be mating with a silly doll. I am not fatuous enough to imagine that you would change the trend of your beliefs in order to harmonise them with mine."
Rosemary made no reply for the moment. Probably had they been alone she would have put out her hand and given his a grateful and understanding squeeze. As it was, the tears gathered in her eyes, for Jasper had spoken so naturally and at the same time so nobly, that her heart was more than ever touched by those splendid qualities in him, which his actions and his words were constantly revealing to her. Perhaps she was nearer to being in love with Jasper Tarkington at this hour than she had been since first he asked her to be his wife; and when the glory of this June afternoon, the twittering of birds, the scent of syringa and lilac in the air brought back with nerve-racking insistence memories of Peter's voice and Peter's touch, it was by mentally comparing the character of the two men as she knew them, that she succeeded in casting those memories away.