‘Madame Corbie—tea!’ echoed Lord Rex Basire, the sun-scorched dandy, absently. ‘Ah, there she goes again! The prettiest girl, yes, by Jove! the out-and-outest girl, every way, I have seen in Guernsey. Golden hair, a complexion, a figure.... Let me take the Venerable her cheering cup at once, and set me free to fly after my Dulcinea.’
‘A new Dulcinea?’ asked Linda, with a glance as sweet as the cup she had prepared for Madame Corbie. ‘I thought Lord Rex Basire had flown after every Dulcinea in the Channel Islands a long time since.’
Lord Rex broke away without reply, causing a good deal of the Venerable’s tea to overflow by reason of his impetuous movements. But he was not set free again as quickly as he desired.
Madame Corbie was what the Scottish bailie called ‘a fine respectit half-worn sort of woman.’ Her set of immediate worshippers, poorer cousins for the most part, would speak of her beneath their breath as so superior! Madame Corbie never smiled. Madame Corbie never retracted a step once taken. It was her harmless boast that she had never read a novel in her life—as one would say he had never cut a throat, or picked a pocket. She would wear no black satin that cost less than ten shillings and sixpence (Guernsey currency) per yard. And she surveyed the moral, as she did the physical, world through a pair of smoke-coloured spectacles.
Even the Archdeaconess, however, had her little stock of human vanities and foibles. Persons of title, though they exist in adequate number on the British mainland, are scarce and prized, like the pink flowering hydrangea, on these smaller islets. With the rectors’ wives from half a dozen country parishes sitting around, neglected, it was a distinctly soothing sensation for good Madame Corbie’s unworldly heart to have Lord Rex Basire, the fifth son of a very impoverished duke, in attendance upon her.
A second cup of tea? Why, Lord Rex and dear Linda were certainly conspiring to spoil us all! And might she, the Archdeaconess, ask if there was such a thing to be had as a macaroon?
‘Too late, Madame Corbie! Lost your chance,’ cried Lord Rex. ‘That young limb, Rahnee, has been beforehand with you. I saw her devouring the last three macaroons at a gulp just as Linda sent me off with your tea.’
Lord Rex was forced to shout these words into Madame Corbie’s ear, for the band of the Maltshire Royals were playing a forcible, much kettle-drummed polka not twenty feet distant, so his attentions, even to the obtuse perceptions of country rectors’ wives, must be unmistakably marked.
‘Sadly unwholesome diet, to be sure. But poor Linda Thorne is so indiscreet in minor matters. You agree with me, do you not, Lord Rex? Nothing more sadly indigestible for a young child’s stomach than macaroons?’
Lord Rex Basire heard her not. It may be doubted whether Lord Rex heard the horns and kettle-drums as they echoed resonantly from the Arsenal walls. He was absorbed in the vision of a distant lovely head, poised flowerlike on a white throat, its waves of amber hair set off against the soft velvet of a Rubens hat. No other interest existed on our planet at that moment for Lord Rex Basire.