"What! Oh, Mrs. Neligage!"
May sat bolt upright and stiffened in her chair as if a wave of liquid air had suddenly gone over her.
"To send a man for the letters under any other circumstances would be as compromising as the letters in the first place. Besides, the Count wouldn't be bound to give them up except to your fiancé."
"That horrid Count!" broke out May with vindictive irrelevancy. "I wish it was just a man we had to deal with!"
"Now Jack has been in love with you for a long time, my dear," pursued Jack's mother.
"Jack! In love with me? Why, he's fond of Alice."
"Oh, in a boy and girl way they've always been the best of friends. It's nothing more. He's in love with you, I tell you. What do you young things know about love anyway, or how to recognize it? I shouldn't tell you this if it weren't for the circumstances; but Jack is too delicate to speak when it might look as if he were taking advantages. He is furious about the letter."
"Oh, does he know too?" cried poor May. "Does everybody know?"
Her tears began again, and now Mrs. Neligage dried them with her own soft handkerchief, faintly scented with the especial eastern scent which she particularly affected. Doubtless a mother may be held to know something of the heart and the opinions of her only son, but as Jack had not, so far as his mother had any means of knowing, in the least connected May Calthorpe with the letter given to Count Shimbowski, it is perhaps not unfair to conclude that her maternal eagerness and affection had in this particular instance led her somewhat far. It is never the way of a clever person to tell more untruths than are actually needed by the situation, and it was perhaps by way of not increasing too rapidly her debit account on the books of the Recording Angel that Mrs. Neligage replied to this question of May's with an evasion,—an evasion, it is true, which was more effective than a simple, direct falsehood would have been.
"Oh, May dear, you don't know the horrid way in which those foreign rakes boast of what they call their conquests!"