“You didn't miss a whole lot. Fact is, before we landed I almost had him sized up for queer, but when he introduced me to the Countess I saw my mistake. He must be the real thing. She certainly is! You come along up and see.”
So Mellin followed, to make his bow before a thin, dark, charmingly pretty young woman, who smiled up at him from her deck-chair through an enhancing mystery of veils; and presently he found himself sitting beside her. He could not help trembling slightly at first, but he would have giving a great deal if, by some miraculous vision, Mary Kramer and other friends of his in Cranston could have seen him engaged in what he thought of as “conversational badinage” with the Comtesse de Vaurigard.
Both the lady and her name thrilled him. He thought he remembered the latter in Froissart: it conjured up “baronial halls” and “donjon keeps,” rang resonantly in his mind like “Let the portcullis fall!” At home he had been wont to speak of the “oldest families in Cranston,” complaining of the invasions of “new people” into the social territory of the McCords and Mellins and Kramers—a pleasant conception which the presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was of short duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him amazingly at ease.
At Calais young Cooley (with a matter-of-course air, and not seeming to feel the need of asking permission) accompanied her to a compartment, and Mellin walked with them to the steps of the coach, where he paused, murmuring some words of farewell.
Madame de Vaurigard turned to him with a prettily assumed dismay.
“What! You stay at Calais?” she cried, pausing with one foot on the step to ascend. “Oh! I am sorry for you. Calais is ter-rible!”
“No. I am going on to Paris.”
“So? You have frien's in another coach which you wish to be wiz?”
“No, no, indeed,” he stammered hastily.
“Well, my frien',” she laughed gayly, “w'y don' you come wiz us?”