At which Mona had turned her eyes upon him,—eyes that literally flashed rebuke, and had told him slowly, but with meaning, that he should remember the dead could not defend themselves, and that she, for one, had not as yet learned to regard the death of any man as "awful luck."
"Give you my word," said the duke afterwards to a select assembly, "when she looked at me then out of her wonderful Irish eyes, and said all that with her musical brogue, I never felt so small in all my life. Reg'lar went into my boots, you know, and stayed there. But she is, without chaff or that, she really is the most charming woman I ever met."
Lady Lilias Eaton, too, had been rather fine upon the Rodney ups and downs. The history of the Australian's devotion had been as a revelation to her. She had actually come out of herself, and had neglected the Ancient Britons for a full day and a half,—on the very highest authority,—merely to talk about Paul Rodney. Surely "nothing in his life became him like the leaving it:" of all those who would scarcely speak to him when living, not one but converses of him familiarly now he is dead.
"So very strange, so unparalleled in this degenerate age," says Lady Lilias to Lady Rodney speaking of the will episode generally, and with as near an approach to enthusiasm as it is possible to her to produce, "A secret panel? How interesting! We lack that at Anadale. Pray, dear Lady Rodney, do tell me all about it again."
Whereupon Lady Rodney, to whom the whole matter is "cakes and ale," does tell it all over again, relating every incident from the removal of the will from the library by Paul, to his surrender of it next day to Mona.
Lady Lilias is delighted.
"It is quite perfect, the whole story. It reminds me of the ballads about King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table."
"Which? the stealing of the will?" asks Lady Rodney, innocently. She knows nothing about the Ancient Britons, and abhors the very sound of their name, regarding them as indecent, immoral people, who went about insufficiently clothed. Of King Arthur and his round knights (as she will call them, having once got so hopelessly mixed on the subject as to disallow of her ever being disentangled again) she knows even less, beyond what Tennyson has taught her.
She understands, indeed, that Sir Launcelot was a very naughty young man, who should not have been received in respectable houses,—especially as he had no money to speak of,—and that Sir Modred and Sir Gawain, had they lived in this critical age, would undoubtedly have been pronounced bad form and expelled from decent clubs. And, knowing this much, she takes it for granted that the stealing of a will or more would be quite in their line: hence her speech.
"Dear Lady Rodney, no," cries the horrified Æsthetic, rather losing faith in her hostess. "I mean about his resigning lands and heritage, position, title, everything—all that a man holds most dear, for a mere sentiment. And then it was so nice of him to shoot himself, and leave her all his money. Surely you must see that?"