Unfortunately he had been unlucky in his choice of partner for the peccadillo. Molly Lafone’s smooth cheek, fine grained as a geranium leaf, and as delicately rouged as a miniature, Molly Lafone’s cheek, ethereally tinted, had the quality of pitch in the eyes of the other ladies, and the touch of it defiled.
My Lord, puffing at his clay in the County Club at Weymouth, with an air half humorous, half defiant, and thinking back on that same cheek with a certain complacence, might perhaps have altered his opinion on the whole matter had he been aware how neatly Mrs. Lafone had timed the episode for the passage of the Queen’s equipage.
They had met, quite accidentally, on the parade.
“Oh, my Lord Kilcroney,” quoth she. “Is it indeed you?”
Her victim as good-humoured and devil-may-care as you please, brought himself up with a wheel and a flourish.
Molly was clasping her hands. It was her trick to go like a snowdrop in the dawn, when the rest of womanhood flared carnation on the cheek. Her small faintly tinted face was absolutely irradiated.
“Is it indeed you, Denis Kilcroney? I declare ’tis like meeting the sun in a fog to see you! Oh, your kind look, my Lord, and your good smile! This place——” She broke off.
“How now!” said he, gallantly saluting a pearl-like inch of wrist between rumpled glove and race ruffle. “What’s wrong with the place, Mrs. Lafone? Troth, and I thought it was the St. James’s over again, for every ten steps don’t I come across a friend! And this is the best meeting of all,” he added, with another bow, another kiss, and a still broader smile, for—deuce take him!—the little thing had been monstrous glad to see him, there was no mistake about that, and he was nothing if not responsive. “And as for the sun,” he went on, straightening himself, and gazing down at her rather fatuously. “Isn’t the great orb of Royalty shining on Weymouth this minute?”
Now Molly Lafone knew how to play such an one as Denis Kilcroney, as a skilful angler plays a fish. She had hooked him with that glance of innocent joy: now she drove the crochets in more firmly by an air of flutter which would have melted any masculine temperament.
(“Oh, I have betrayed myself,” her tremor, her shy butterfly glance, her sigh, her shaken laughter proclaimed.)