Nina nodded, and then the two chattered commonplace for a moment to throw off suspicion. When Nina sat up again her seed-cake was gone and the duke was chuckling.
"But where is it?" she asked, perplexity in her violet eyes.
His grace pointed to the floor at her farther side. Tara was lying there. "He's yours, I suppose. He took the seed-cake at a gulp. Fine staghound that. I had a pair like him once. I say, Doody, didn't I have a fine pair of black staghounds once?"
"Yes, Pucketts." That was the duke's nickname from the cradle.
"Everything's foxhounds nowadays. But when I was younger," he went on—and on—and on.
Nina, delighted to see the animal once more, was caressing his long ears and mumbling baby-talk to him.
In the privacy of the guest-suite she occupied the duchess smoked one cigarette after another and told Nina Darling that it was Sir Caryll himself who had broken the engagement at the last minute, and not the prospective mother-in-law, as the world had it.
"But why? I thought he was madly in love with the girl."
"Oh, he was. But you see he learned something in a most accidental way, and when he asked Rosamond about it, she confirmed it with perfect candor. It seems her own father—Mrs. Veynol's first husband—is a convict. He is still in prison somewhere in the States.
"The whole story—without names, of course, but going just as far as they dared go—appeared last week in British Society. I don't take the scurrilous sheet, of course; but my maid does, and she gave it to me to read. I've been wondering if Kitty saw it."