At last Pierre arrived, looking trim and slim in a frock-coat. Mary was glad that he had dressed ceremoniously, for she knew how much importance Grandmamma attached to ceremony.
"Oh, Pierre," she exclaimed. "I only wanted to see you for a moment just to advise you to talk in French to Lady Flower. She is half French herself, you know, and I'm sure it will all sound much better in your own language. It's not that you don't speak English perfectly, but you might make a slip in a foreign tongue. You might give quite a wrong impression."
Pierre agreed with her about the wisdom of this, and then he took her in his arms.
"Ma bien aimée," he whispered. "Will you give me courage with one kiss?"
She fluttered upon his arms more lightly than a bird, more lightly than a moth, more lightly than a crimson leaf that is blown whispering along a window-pane. Then hearing her grandmother's step she fled from the room through the domed conservatory past the staring eyes of the pelargoniums and the pug-faced, toothless calceolarias.
Twenty minutes later, Mary found Pierre gone and her grandmother reading The Times as if she were trying to assure herself that normal life would continue in spite of a presumptuous young Frenchman, who without prospects asked for the hand of an heiress.
"Although, considering what he is," said Lady Flower, "the young man behaved very well. I was able to show him at once how ridiculous it was that he should aspire to marry you."
"But I love him," Mary interposed.
"I have no doubt that at this moment you do love him. It is my business, dear child, to protect you against impulse."
Lady Flower was once more sitting in her boudoir at Barton Hall with her son before her. She had made the mistake then of sneering at Mary's mother, and although in this case it was unlikely that Mary would take matters into her own hand, it would be imprudent to run the risk of her doing so. With experience of a similar situation she ought to be able this time to have her own way. The old lady looked at Mary with an unwonted warmth of affection: Mary was Edward's daughter. The fact seemed to strike her for the first time. Edward's daughter ... Edward who was drowned twenty years ago. Poor Edward, so like his mother! And there was Mary holding her hands just as he had held them on that June afternoon, the day before he married and tore himself forever from the bosom of family life, as perhaps she herself might have held her hands fifty years ago if she had had to oppose the wishes of that stern old general who fought at Waterloo or of that dainty mother who bred in exile had yet kept about her the remote grace and grandeur of the ancien régime.