“I see. And had you yourself, in suggesting the Sergeant for the case, any arrière pensée at that time, connecting——?”
“I had merely a curiosity, my friend, to observe the owner of a name—really ipsissima verba to me—so oddly associated in my mind with the teller of a certain fantastic story in Paris.”
“Then you did not know—but of course you didn’t.” He turned to the Baronet: “I congratulate you with all my heart, Orsden.”
“Thanks, old fellow,” said Sir Francis. “It’s all due to him there. I’ll give his health, in B-Bob Cratchit’s words. Here’s to M. le Baron, ‘the Founder of the Feast’!”
CHAPTER XXI.
A LAST WORD
Miss Kennett, still in process of qualifying herself for a musician, was at work on Czerny’s fifth exercise, which, like the pons asinorum of an earlier strategist, could present an insuperable problem to an intelligence already painful master of the four preceding. To pick up one note with her was, like the clown with the packages, to drop half a dozen others; to give its proper value to the right hand was to leave the left struggling in a partial paralysis. Still she persevered, lips counting, eyes glued to the page, pretty fingers sprawling, until a sudden laugh at the open door of the room startled her efforts into a shiver of unexpected harmony. She looked up with a shake and a smile that suggested somehow to the observer a bird scattering water from its wings in a sunshiny basin.
“O, Frank!” she exclaimed, and stretched herself with glistening easefulness.
“You p-poor goose,” he answered. “You’ll never play, you know.”
She jumped up with a cry, and ran to him.
“Do you mean it? Are you sure?”