“Bring him round to-morrow afternoon about tea-time,” said Monkley. “You haven’t forgotten the family history, Henry?”
Henry said that he had not forgotten a single relation, and that he damned them severally each morning in all their titles while he was dressing.
The next afternoon Sylvia sat in an arm-chair in the presence-room, which Henry supposed was so called because none of the furniture had been paid for, and waited for Godfrey Hurndale’s coming. Her father put on the rusty black evening-dress of the family retainer, and Jimmy wore a most conspicuous check suit and talked so loudly and nasally that Henry was driven to a final protest:
“Look here, Jimmy, I’ve dressed up to help this show in a suit that’s as old as one of those infernal ancestors of Sil’s, but if you don’t get less American it’ll fall to pieces. Every time you guess I can hear a seam give.”
“Remember to talk nothing but French,” Monkley warned Sylvia, when the bell rang. “Go on, Harry. You’ve got to open the door. And don’t forget that you can only speak French.”
Monkley followed him out of the room, and his voice could be heard clanking about the hall as he invited young Hurndale into the dining-room first. Henry came back and took up his position behind Sylvia’s chair; she felt very solemn and excited, and asked her father rather irritably why he was muttering. The reason, however, remained a mystery, for the dining-room door opened again and, heralded by Monkley’s twanging invitation, Mr. Hurndale stood shyly in the entrance to the presence-room.
“Go right in, Mr. Hurndale,” Monkley said. “I guess his Majesty’s just about ready to meet you.”
Sylvia, when she saw the young man bowing before her, really felt a kind of royal exaltation and held out her hand to be kissed.
Hurndale reverently bent over it and touched it with his lips; so did the prince, an action for which Sylvia was unprepared and which she rather resented, thinking to herself that he really did not shave and that it had not only been his grubby appearance. Then Hurndale offered her a large bunch of white carnations and she became kingly again.
“François,” she commanded her father, “mets ces œillets dans ma chambre.”