"What do you mean?" she asked quickly, as I stopped.
"Whom should I mean but"—looking at her pointedly—"Madame Chansette, shall I say?" She laughed.
"Yes, we'll say Madame Chansette."
"And yet—well, it doesn't much matter whom we say; but at any rate he's a thoroughly genuine fellow, and—you can fill in the rest. But, by the way, where is Mercy?"
"She is having a French or Spanish lesson, I think; I'll tell you all about it when you've finished your breakfast, and not a minute before. But about Mr. Mayhew, tell me, what is he at the Embassy here? He seems to speak as though he was a kind of mill-horse. Are there no prospects for him? Has he no influence to push him on?"
"Yes, he has one, I think I may say two friends now who will see to that. I'm one of the two—and I think I'm speaking to the other," I said, quietly. "And between us we ought to do something. But he's as proud as Lucifer, and a mere hint that we were at the back of anything of the kind would make him kick."
"If poor A.B.C. were alive——"
"Then, my dear Mrs. Curwen, you would never have been in Madrid, and would never have known Mayhew." She shrugged her shapely shoulders, smiled, and then said with unusual earnestness: "And will you really let me help you in trying to get him a step or two up the ladder?"
"I mean to have him in London, and to make the people at home understand that he has a head on his shoulders fit for better things. Why, if Silas only had money to back his brains, there's nothing he might not do or be. But there, I've finished my breakfast!" I exclaimed, getting up from the table, thinking I had said enough. "And now, where is Mercy?"
"Will you shake hands on that bargain, Lord Glisfoyle?" she asked, her eyes bright with the thoughts I knew I had started. We shook hands gravely, as became such a compact, and I looked straight into her eyes, as I said in as earnest a tone as hers: "The woman who marries Silas Mayhew will have a husband in a hundred thousand, true, honest-hearted, straight and good right through. And now, where is Mercy?" She returned my look, coloured slightly, and some reply sprang to her lips, but she checked it, and turning away, said: "Sebastian Quesada's sister came here, and the two girls are closeted together, waiting for you."