"I can't understand why you should suspect Daker of villany, as I see you do, Bertram."
"I tell you he was a most accomplished, prepossessing villain, my dear Q.M. Your upper class villains are always prepossessing. Manners are as necessary to them as a small hand to a pickpocket."
"Sharp, but unfair—only partly true, like all sweeping generalizations. I think, as I hope, that the wife found the husband, and that they are nestling in some Italian retreat."
"And never had the grace to write you a word! No, no, you say they had manners. That, at any rate, then, is not the solution of the mystery."
Bertram was right here. Then what had become of Mrs. Daker? Daker, if alive, was a scoundrel, and one who had contrived to take care of himself. But that sweet country face! Here was a heart that might break, but would never harden.
"Mystery it must and will remain, I suppose."
"One of many," was Bertram's gay reply. "How they overload these matches with sulphur!"
He was lighting his cigar. His phaeton was at the door. A globule of Chartreuse; a compliment for the chef, a bow to the dame de comptoir, and we were on our way to the Bois, at a brisk trot, for the great world had cleared off to act tragedy and comedy by the ocean shore, or the invalid's well, or the gambler's green baize.
Bertram—one of that great and flourishing class of whom Scandal says "she doesn't know how they do it, or who pays for it"—albeit a bad match, even for Miss Tayleure, was, as I have said, in good English and French society, and drove his phaeton. He was saluted on his way along the Champs Elysées and by the lake, by many, and by some ladies who were still unaccountably lingering in Paris. A superb little Victoria passed. Bertram raised his hat.
"An Irish girl," he said, "of superb beauty."