“What am I to do, old man? Here’s the Countess says that I must marry Vivienne or she can’t let her go to England with me. She says you have a home to take your lady-love to, while I have none. I intend to make one, though.”
“The Countess is right,” said Jack, “and do you know I have been thinking that the best way to overcome possible objection is to render it futile.”
“Well, I can’t say that I follow you,” remarked Vandemar.
“Well, you will understand me,” said Jack, “when I express my determination of following you.”
Still Vandemar did not understand. “Why, of course,” said he, “we always intended to go to England together.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “Our original intention was to go as four separate individuals, but as the Fates seem to have decided that you and Vivienne must go as a couple, I am more than willing to take time by the forelock and, with Bertha’s kind co-operation, make another couple.”
Vandemar grasped Jack’s hand. “From the time we first met until to-day, Jack, I’ve never got into any kind of trouble, any sort of a dilemma, that you did not contrive some way of getting me out of it.”
“Well, you know,” said Jack, “that somehow or other we neither of us have forgotten the old story of Pylades and Orestes.”
“And I hope we never shall,” said Vandemar, fervently.
A sudden thought came to Jack. “Well, I may have kept faith with you and done part, if not all that I should have done in your behalf, but there is one poor fellow whom I have entirely forgotten, so fully have I been carried away by my own happiness.”