“Your gloves, Billy,” retorted Mademoiselle Charrier gaily. “Still a pair from the beautiful great box you bought me. You remember, yes?”
“Ah, the box you won from me at that flying-meeting. Of course I remember.”
And I too remembered hearing of those gloves and this bet, ages ago—the afternoon after I had been out to lunch for the first time with my official fiancé.
So this was the young French girl he’d told me about! And as I watched them standing chatting together, a little apart from the group round the motor outside, I suddenly gave a quick guess at something else he might have had to tell me about her if he’d chosen.
This very girl had something to do with his official engagement to me! Somehow or other, she was his “reason” for appearing to have a fiancée at all—a fiancée upon whom he’d been so particular to impress that “this affair would never end in marriage!” Possibly my employer and that girl were already secretly—but really, not nominally—betrothed to one another?
It looked like it. It looked uncommonly like it.
At something he said she blushed quite rosily. Oh, and they mustn’t think I didn’t notice her shake of the head and her quick little silencing frown at my official fiancé when her father, in a tea-coloured alpaca dust-coat, at last left off fussing over his engines and asked them if they—calling them “mes enfans”—were ready to start?
“Oh—but are you going too, then, Billy?” his mother put in quickly. Monsieur Charrier answered with a flow of French about “affaires,” and documents which he had left at his hotel in Holyhead, which it would be so much, so much better if Mr. Waters would spare but a little half-hour to investigate.
“Very good of you to give me the opportunity, sir,” said Mr. Waters. “I can get a train back, mother.”
“Ah, but no, but no! The auto will be again at your service as soon as we have dined at that dog of an hotel,” declared the stout Frenchman. “I will bring your son home quite safely, madame, to you and”—with a particularly hollow show of politeness—“to mademoiselle!”