"That would be beautiful," said Lady Caroline with an inward shudder. "What a dear fellow you are, to be sure, to take up my poor little suggestion like this!"
"Take it up," cried Jack, "I should think I would take it up! It'll be the best sport out. Lady Caroline, you're one in two or three! I'm truly thankful for the tip. Here's my hand on it!"
His hand was pressed without delay.
"It really is an excellent suggestion," said Claude Lafont, in his deliberate way, after mature consideration. "It only remains to settle the date."
"And the brand of fizz, old man, and the sort of fireworks! I'll leave all that to you. And the date, too; any day will do me; the sooner the better."
"Well," said Lady Caroline, as though it had only just struck her, "Olivia's birthday is the twentieth——"
"Mamma!" cried that young lady, with real indignation.
"And it's her twenty-first birthday," pursued the other, "and she is my ewe lamb. I must confess I should like to honour that occasion——"
"Same here! By all manner o' means!" broke in the Duke. "Now, Miss Sellwood, it's no use your saying one word; this thing's a fixture for the twentieth as ever is."
The girl was furious. The inevitable, nay, the intentional linking of her name with that of the Duke of St. Osmund's, entailed by the arrangement thus mooted and made, galled her pride to the quick. And yet it was but one more twang of the catapult that was daily and almost hourly throwing her at his head; neither was it his fault any more than hers; so she made shift to thank him, as kindly as she could at the moment, for the compliment he was so ready to pay her—at her mother's suggestion.