"It is long past midnight now, sweetheart," he said with sudden irrelevance.
"Yes, I know. I have been watching the time: and I have already thought everything out for the best. I very often go home from balls and routs in the company of Lady Ffoulkes and sleep in her house those nights. Father is always quite satisfied, when I do that, and to-night he will be doubly satisfied feeling that I shall be taken away from your society. Lady Ffoulkes is in the secret, of course, so Lady Blakeney told me, and she will be ready for me in a few minutes now: she'll take me home with her and there I will change my dress and rest for awhile, waiting for the happy hour. She will come to the church with me and then ... oh then! Oh! my dear milor!" she added suddenly with a deep sigh whilst her whole face became irradiated with a light of intense happiness, "as you say it is the most wonderful thing in all the world—this—our beautiful adventure together."
"The parson will be ready at half-past six, dear heart, it was the earliest hour that I could secure ... after that we go at once to your church and the priest will tie up any loose threads which our English parson failed to make tight. After those two ceremonies we shall be very much married, shan't we?... and nothing can come between us, dear heart, can it?" he queried with a look of intense anxiety on his young face.
"Nothing," she replied. Then she added with a short sigh: "Poor father!"
"Dear heart, he will only fret for a little while. I don't believe he can really want you to marry that man Martin-Roget. It is just obstinacy on his part. He can't have anything against me really ... save of course that I am not clever and that I shall never do anything very big in the world ... except to love you, Yvonne, with my whole heart and soul and with every fibre and muscle in me.... Oh! I'll do that," he added with boyish enthusiasm, "better than anyone else in all the world could do! And your father will, I'll be bound, forgive me for stealing you, when he sees that you are happy, and contented, and have everything you want and ... and...."
As usual Lord Tony's eloquence was not equal to all that it should have expressed. He blushed furiously and with a quaint, shy gesture, passed his large, well-shaped hand over his smooth, brown hair. "I am not much, I know," he continued with a winning air of self-deprecation, "and you are far above me as the stars—you are so wonderful, so clever, so accomplished and I am nothing at all ... but ... but I have plenty of high-born connexions, and I have plenty of money and influential friends ... and ... and Sir Percy Blakeney, who is the most accomplished and finest gentleman in England, calls me his friend."
She smiled at his eagerness. She loved him for his clumsy little ways, his halting speech, that big loving heart of his which was too full of fine and noble feelings to find vent in mere words.
"Have you ever met a finer man in all the world?" he added enthusiastically.
Yvonne de Kernogan smiled once more. Her recollections of Sir Percy Blakeney showed her an elegant man of the world, whose mind seemed chiefly occupied on the devising and the wearing of exquisite clothes, in the uttering of lively witticisms for the entertainment of his royal friend and the ladies of his entourage: it showed her a man of great wealth and vast possessions who seemed willing to spend both in the mere pursuit of pleasures. She liked Sir Percy Blakeney well enough, but she could not understand clever and charming Marguerite Blakeney's adoration for her inane and foppish husband, nor the whole-hearted admiration openly lavished upon him by men like Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, my lord Hastings, and others. She would gladly have seen her own dear milor choose a more sober and intellectual friend. But then she loved him for his marvellous power of whole-hearted friendship, for his loyalty to those he cared for, for everything in fact that made up the sum total of his winning personality, and she pinned her faith on that other mysterious friend whose individuality vastly intrigued her.
"I am more interested in your anonymous friend," she said quaintly, "than in Sir Percy Blakeney. But he too is kindness itself and Lady Blakeney is an angel. I like to think that the happiest days of my life—our honeymoon, my dear lord—will be spent in their house."