He walked to the end of Sloane Street and took a taxi. His mind was greatly disturbed. B had behaved beautifully. She had bowed to his decision with hardly a word of protest, and he knew well enough by the look on her face when she had asked him her last question what it had cost her to do so. It was impossible to take refuge in the thought that she couldn't love this fellow much, if she resigned herself so easily to doing without him for six months. She had resigned out of love for her father, and trust in him. It was beastly to feel that he had not yet told her everything, and that her faith in him not to make her unhappy—at least in the present—was unfounded. Again he felt himself undecided. But what could he do? How was it possible that she could judge of a man of Lassigny's type. Her love for him was pure and innocent. What was his love for her?
Well, he would find that out. The fellow should have his chance. He would not take it for granted that he had just taken a fancy—the latest of many—to a pretty face, and the charm and freshness of a very young girl; and since she happened to be of the sort that he could marry, was willing to gain possession of her in that way.
Lassigny was announced a little after twelve o'clock. His card was brought in: "Marquis de Clermont-Lassigny," in letters of print, all on a larger scale than English orthodoxy dictates. His card was vaguely distasteful to Grafton.
But when he went in to him, in the old-fashioned parlour reserved for visitors, he could not have told, if he had not known, that he was not an Englishman. His clothes were exactly 'right' in every particular. His dark moustache was clipped to the English fashion. His undoubted good looks were not markedly of the Latin type.
The two men shook hands, Lassigny with a smile, Grafton without one.
"You had my letter?" Lassigny asked.
"Yes," said Grafton, motioning him to a chair and taking one himself.
"It ought to have been written," said Lassigny, "before I spoke to Beatrix. But I trust you will understand it was not from want of respect to you that it wasn't. I have come now to ask your permission—to affiance myself to your daughter."
"I wish you hadn't," said Grafton, looking at him with a half-smile. He couldn't treat this man whom he had last seen as a welcome guest in his own house as the enemy he had since felt him to be.
Lassigny made a slight gesture with shoulders and hands that was not English. "Ah," he said, "she is very young, and you don't want to lose her. She said you would feel like that. I shouldn't want to lose her myself if she were my daughter. But I hope you will give her to me, all the same. I did not concern myself with business arrangements in my letter, but my lawyers——"