A Struggle for a Ring — page 160: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

156 AN ANXIOUS MOTHER. love that was consuming him. He walked quickly until _he reached the sea-shore—the worst place he could have chosen, for it seemed to him that she stood there still, the lovely face so tender and fair in the starlight. Could it be true that she cared for him?—she, the proud, peerless Lady Ethel, on whose smile princes waited —she, who might wed with the noblest in the land—she to care for him! Wasit true? He lay down on the sand and thought over all the incidents of their friendship. Suddenly her annoyance that he could not understand her song, that he did not know the meaning of it, came before him—‘‘ Faint heart never won fair lady.” She had thought him faint-hearted, then, because he had not dared to woo her. She had, in her graceful fashion, been willing to encourage him, and she must have thought him a laggard in love, indeed. Now he understood why she would not tell the earl, his father, how the song ended. ‘*Perhaps the ‘faint heart’ rode away without telling his love,” she had said. He must have been more than blind, he must have been stupid, not to have understood it. That very word recalled the last scene on the shore most forcibly to him. ‘‘ Men are so stupid,” Lady Ethel had said. ) Well might she say so. Here was the loveliest, proudest girl in England trying to let him see that she liked him, and he had not understood. ‘‘She will hate me; she will think me the greatest boor in existence. So Iam. But, oh! Lady Ethel, what matters your, love or your hate? My peerless queen, you are not for me. I have tied my own hands; I cannot stretch them out for you.” He pictured to himself what it would have been had he _ not offered himself on this altar of honor. He would (E(0) mm (C JOO Ss.