CHAPTER XII.
A WOMAN'S HEART It is difficult, perhaps, to analyze rightly the feelings and sensations of a young girl, when she is literally being swept off her feet in a whirlpool of passion and romance.
Some few years later when Lady Sue wrote those charming memoirs which are such an interesting record of her early life, she tried to note with faithful accuracy what was the exact state of her mind when three months after her first meeting with Prince Amede d'Orleans, she plighted her troth to him and promised to marry him in secret and in defiance of her guardian's more than probable opposition.
Her sentiments with regard to her mysterious lover were somewhat complex, and undoubtedly she was too young, too inexperienced then to differentiate between enthusiastic interest in a romantic personality, and real, lasting, passionate love for a man, as apart from any halo of romance which might be attached to him.
When she was a few years older she averred that she could never have really loved her prince, because she always feared him.

Hers, therefore, was not the perfect love that casteth out fear.

She was afraid of him in his ardent moods, almost as much as when he allowed his unbridled temper free rein.

Whenever she walked through the dark bosquets of the park, on her way to a meeting with her lover, she was invariably conscious of a certain trepidation of all her nerves, a wonderment as to what he would say when she saw him, how he would act; whether chide, or rave, or merely reproach.
It was the gentle and pathetic terror of a child before a stern yet much-loved parent.

Yet she never mistrusted him ...