"Is there something about him in the paper?" asked Lesley, who had been expecting news, but would have preferred to read it herself, if she could have chosen.
"I should think there was!" exclaimed her aunt, screened behind the great printed sheets again.
"Is he engaged already?" Lesley enquired, making a sketch of Lord Loveland's profile in the midst of a speech of Dick's, though Dick was a very different sort of young man from Loveland, a very different sort indeed. How many times she had caught herself tracing the outline of those features—so clear, so straight, so perfect an outline, that it was as easy to draw as to copy a Greek statue. She knew every line, and often the little profile-portrait was there before her eyes on the paper before she knew what she had been doing. She was almost perfectly certain what Aunt Barbara's answer to her question would be. Of course he was engaged. He had hardly had time to make the acquaintance of any new girls in New York, and propose marriage, so it must be Elinor Coolidge—or Fanny Milton.
"Engaged!" echoed the elder. "No, indeed. What a mercy he's been found out before some nice girl was mixed up in the scandal. Of course he wanted——"
"A scandal!" Now at last Lesley did lift her head, quickly, and the last profile-sketch looked as if it had been struck by lightning.
"Shocking," answered Mrs. Loveland. "What a dreadful thing that our country should be looked upon as a sort of gold mine by these foreign birds of prey."
Lesley's little ears burned pink as if her aunt had boxed them. Her eyes sent out a spark, but its fire was quenched in a sudden trickle of nervous laughter. "Dear Aunt Barb! Would 'birds of prey' make successful miners?"
Aunt Barbara laughed, too. "You're always catching me up for my similes," she said. "But luckily I don't write stories, so it doesn't matter. And anyway that's what they are; birds of prey. As for what they do, they marry our girls, who find them out too late, and then try to get divorces. What an escape for some poor little heiress, that this creature is hoist with his own petard in the very midst of baiting his wicked trap! You needn't look at me like that, child. I don't care how mixed up I am. Did this man look like a gentleman?"
"Yes," said Lesley. "Naturally, because he is a gentleman."
"My dear! he must have been clever to hoodwink an observant little thing like you, who can see right down into people's hearts, even when you hardly seem to be noticing how they do their hair, or the colour of their neckties. This man is nothing but his own valet."