"Oh, yes!" was the careless reply. "Vermont says there is nothing to touch him."
The countess raised her eyebrows.
"You trust this Vermont with a great deal, Adrien. Your horses, your wine, and your legal business. He must be a wonderful man."
"Yes," he answered confidently. "Jasper's a treasure. Nothing comes amiss to him. I should be in my grave if I had to face half the worries he wrestles with daily. Come," he added, as the first bars of the new waltz floated from the gallery; and with a sigh of enjoyment she rose for the promised dance.
"No one's step suits me like yours," she breathed, when they paused for rest. "Adrien, shall I back 'King Cole' for another two hundred?"
The two sentences were, perhaps, rather incongruous, but curiously characteristic of her ladyship; for, in addition to a natural love of intrigue, she had a partiality for betting on the turf and speculation on 'Change--both, of course, sub rosa.
"Oh, yes," he said, as they started again. "Jasper has put two thousand more of mine on to-day. There he is," he broke off, as the sleek, carefully dressed figure of Mr. Vermont entered the ball-room.
"Talk of angels," murmured Lady Merivale, but with a glance implying that she meant a being very far removed from that celestial grade.
Jasper Vermont did not excel at dancing; yet, strange to say, he was invariably invited to every big function of the season. Indeed, the hostesses of Mayfair would almost as soon have omitted the name of Adrien Leroy himself as that of his friend.
It was difficult to explain this other than on account of his engaging amiability. Probably Vermont would have transformed the famous advice of Uriah Heep to "Always be obliging." Certainly, no pleasanter company could be found, whether for man or woman; whatever the hour, however mixed the company, Jasper Vermont had always a smile, a jest, or a new and piquant scandal. In the smoking-room he would rival Mortimer Shelton in apparently good-natured cynicism. In a duchess's boudoir he would enliven the afternoon tea hour with the neatest of epigrams and the spiciest slander of her Grace's dearest friend. Nothing came amiss to him; as Adrien Leroy had once said, he was "a walking encyclopædia."