“Your royal highness,” he whispers, pleadingly, “I am afraid.”
“Afraid of whom, pray?”
“The king, your royal highness.”
The Duchess makes an angry motion with her hand, while her little boot smites the stone floor and sends an echo through the room’s vast emptiness.
“Father Joseph, observe! You are my almoner. Through your hands I give fifty thousand louis to the poor of Paris, and keep you in fatness besides. It is I, not the king, whom you should fear.”
And so, before the flickering altar candles, Commodore Paul Jones weds Aimee Adele de Telison. In the book which the Duchess and the good Marsan sign as witnesses, Father Joseph, with a pen that shakes a little, records the nuptials of “Monsieur le Joignes and Mademoiselle Adele de Bonneval.” For “de Bonneval” was the dead King’s name for Aimee’s mother in the days of Monsieur le Bel and the Parc-aux-Cerfs.
CHAPTER XXIV—THAT HONEYMOON SUB ROSA
The Duchess kisses Aimee, and the good Marsan drives back to her palace with the blissful ones through the black midnight Paris streets. Commodore Paul Jones is in a trance of happiness. Aimee creeps into his arms and whispers “Mon Paul,” and the surrender of the Serapis is forgotten, as a thing trivial and transient, in the surrender of this girl with the glorious red-gold hair.