"Pshaw!" she retorted, "was it likely?"
"I had heard nothing of the Legros for many years," he said dejectedly. "My father had died out in the Colony: my mother and I continued to live there on a meagre pittance which that miserly old reprobate—my great-uncle—grudgingly bestowed upon us. This was scarce sufficient for our wants, let alone for enabling us to save enough money to pay our passage home. At first my mother was in the habit of asking for and obtaining help from the Legros!—you understand? she never would have consented to the connection," added the young man with naïve cynicism, "had she not intended to derive profit therefrom, so whenever an English or a French ship touched the coast my poor mother would contrive to send a pathetic letter to be delivered in Paris, at the house of the king's tailor. But after a while answers to these missives became more and more rare, soon they ceased altogether, and it is now eight years since the last remittance came—"
"The worthy tailor and his wife were getting tired of the aristocratic connection," commented Mistress Julia drily; "no doubt they too had intended to derive profit therefrom and none came."
"Was I not right, Mistress, in thinking that ill-considered marriage forgotten?" quoth Lord Stowmaries with more vehemence than he had displayed in the actual recital of the sordid tale; "was I not justified in thinking that the Legros had by now bitterly regretted the union of their only child to the penniless son of a spendthrift father? Tell me," he reiterated hotly, "was I not justified?—I thought that they had forgotten—that they had regretted—that Rose Marie had found a husband more fitted to her lowly station and to her upbringing—and that her parents would only be too glad to think that I too had forgotten—or that I was dead."
There was a slight pause. Mistress Julia's white brow was puckered into a deep frown of thought.
"Well, my lord," she said at last, "ye've told me the past—and though the history be not pretty, it is past and done with, and I take it that your concern now is rather with the present."
"Alas!"
"Nay! sigh me not such doleful sighs, man!" she exclaimed with angry impatience, "but in the name of all the saints get on with your tale. What has happened? The Legros have found out that little Rupert Kestyon hath now become Earl of Stowmaries and one of the richest peers in the kingdom—that's it—is it not?"
"Briefly, that is it, Mistress. They demand that their daughter be instated in her position and the full dignities and rights to which her marriage entitle her."
"Failing which?" she asked curtly.