Set in Silver

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

You will be wondering by this time why I'm sorry we stayed at Southsea, when it was all for me, and I seem to have been having the "time of my life." But I'm coming to the part you want to know about.

I thought perhaps Dick Burden would be vexed at my going off with Sir Lionel, under his nose, just as he was ready to say "my dance." However, he walked up to me as if nothing had happened, when it was time for the second, so I didn't apologize. I thought it best to let sleeping partners lie.

We danced a little, but Dick, who is one-and-twenty, doesn't waltz half as well as Sir Lionel, who is forty; and he saw that I thought so. Presently he asked if I'd rather sit out the rest, and I answered, yes; so he said he would tell me the things he had to say. He found a quiet place, which must have looked as if deliberately selected for a desperate flirtation; and then he didn't do much beating about the bush. He just told me that he knew everything. He'd partly "detected" it, and partly found out by chance; but of course he made the most of the detecting bit.

Don't be frightened and get a palpitation at the news, dearest; it isn't worth it. There's going to be no flare-up. Of course, if I were the heroine of a really nice melodrama, in such a scene as Dick and I went through, I should have been accompanied by slow music, with lime-light every time I turned my head, which would have heartened me up very much; while Dick would have had villain music—plink, plink, plunk! But I did as well as I could without an accompaniment, and I think, on the whole, managed the business very well.

You see, I had to think of Ellaline. I dared not let her out of my mind for a single instant, for if I should fail her now, at the crucial time, it would be my fault if her love story burst and went up the spout. If I'd stopped thinking of her, and saying in my mind while Dick talked, "I must save Ellaline, no matter what happens to me!" I should certainly have boxed his ears and told him to go to limbo.

He began by telling me that he'd met a friend of mine, a Miss Bennett—Kathy Bennett. Oh, mother, just for a minute my heart beat under my pretty frock like a bird caught in a child's hand! You remember my writing you what a friendship Ellaline and Kathy struck up, before Kathy left school to go back to England, and how she sent Ellaline cuttings from the London Radical papers about Sir Lionel Pendragon in Bengal? I do think it's almost ungentlemanly of so many coincidences to happen in connection with what I'm trying to do for Ellaline. But Kathy's such a lump, it's too great a compliment to call her a coincidence. Anyhow, Dick met her in town, at a tea party (a "bun worry," he called it) where he went with his dear Aunt Gwen; and when Kathy mentioned being at school at Madame de Maluet's, he asked if she knew Miss Lethbridge. She said of course she did, and she thought Ellaline was a "very naughty little thing" not to write or come and see her. She had read in the papers about the arrival of Sir Lionel with his sister and ward, you see.

Dick remarked that he'd hardly call Miss Lethbridge a "little thing," whereupon Kathy defended her adjective by saying Ellaline was only about up to her ear.

Of course that set Mr. Dick's detective bump to throbbing furiously. He reassured me by announcing that he hadn't said any more to Kathy, but that he'd thought a lot. In fact, he thought so much that he asked if she'd give him a line of introduction to Madame, as he had a cousin who wanted to go to a French school, and next time he "ran across to Paris," he might have a look at Versailles. Kathy gave the note, and that same night, if you'll believe it, the horrid little boy did "run across." At the earliest hour possible in the morning he called at the school, only to find Madame already away for her holidays. But you know she always leaves her sister, Mademoiselle Prado, to look after things, and when Mademoiselle heard what Dick wanted, she showed him all over the place. He said he would like to see photographs of the young ladies in groups, if any such existed, because he could write his Australian cousin what nice, happy-looking girls they were. Promptly that poor, unsuspecting female produced the big picture Madame had done of the tea-party on the lawn, a year ago in June, and there was I in it. But Dick was too foxy to begin by asking questions about me. Kathy adorned the photograph also, with Ellaline on her right and me in the perspective of her left ear, which must have seemed to point at me accusingly. Dick could claim Kathy quite naturally, as he'd come with her letter, and presently he led up to me, saying he seemed to have seen me somewhere. Was I a great friend of Miss Bennett's, and was it probable that she had my portrait?

Mademoiselle innocently said no, Miss Bennett was much more likely to have Mees Lethbridge's portrait than Mees Brendon's, as Mees Brendon was not a pupil of the school, only a teacher of singing, and Mees Kathy was not musical. But Mees Lethbridge, la petite jeune fille on the right, was a friend of Mees Bennett.

Now you'll admit that Dick was rather smart to have chopped all these branches off the tree of knowledge with his little hatchet. I think his cleverness worthy of a better cause.