“I haven’t the faintest notion. All this happened a good many years ago, when you were almost in your cradle. Why, Ralph, if he is alive, must be getting on in years by this time. There, that’s about all the story that it’s worth your while to know, my dear, and now we’ll lock the correspondence away in my private safe. Let me have the portrait again when you have done with it.”
Yseulte, as we have said, was not a romantically inclined girl, yet, somehow, this faded portrait of the man of whom nobody had heard anything for almost as many years as she herself had lived, made a vivid impression on her. As she sat contemplating it, a voice arose from the lawn beneath, saying in the most approved Oxford drawl:
“Ah, how do you do, Mrs Santorex? I’ve brought rather a queer plant that your husband may not have in his collection. It strikes me as a curious specimen.” And then Mrs Santorex was heard asking the speaker in.
Father and daughter looked at each other with the most comical expression in the world. Then the former murmured, with a dry, noiseless laugh:
“He’s found the four-leaved shamrock. Oh, Chickie, Chickie! have some pity on poor Geoffry Plantagenet, and put him out of his misery, once and for all!”
The girl could hardly stifle her laughter. Her father, for his part, was thinking resignedly that to the bald expedients devised by enamoured youth as pretexts for numerous and wholly unnecessary visits to the parent or lawful guardian of its idol, there is no limit.