"'And darkness!' the brothers echoed her together. 'We can never thank you enough, Lady McIntyre. We will persevere with your friend Lord Grantbury's remedy.'" The brothers clicked their heels and pressed their lips to her hand and left her in a flutter. The poor young men's anxiety was most touching! Especially Carl's. Lady McIntyre, according to Napier, doted on Carl. He wasn't so taken up by his filial preoccupations either, that he couldn't sympathize with the anxiety of a mother. Lady McIntyre's about Madge. Mr. Carl agreed that Miss Gayne was not the person. He had seen that at once. No influence whatever. Miss McIntyre was a very charming young lady. Full of character. Fire, too. She required special handling.
"'Ah! how well you understand! Now, what do you advise me to do? Seeing you reminds me,' Lady McIntyre said with her infantile candor, 'that we've never tried a German governess. We've had so many French ones. And quite an army of English and Scotch—'
"'Ah! a German governess!'"—he pulled at his mustache. Mr. Pforzheim promised to consult his aunt. The widow of a Heidelberg professor.
By a special providence Frau Lenz knew of a young lady who was at that moment in London, on her way home from America. She would be the very person to consult.
"She was the very person to get," Lady McIntyre said, when she came back from interviewing the paragon. "And, Heaven be praised, I've got her!"
They had gone back to London on account of that commission Sir William had insisted on having appointed. There were a lot of people in London that July, and things going on. Madge in the thick of everything, as though she'd been twenty-five instead of fifteen. That's how the von Schwarzenberg found her, neglecting lessons, ignoring laws, living at the theater, figuring at her father's official parties, sitting up till all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes till her fingers looked as if she'd been shelling green walnuts, gossiping, arguing, on every subject under the sun. That's the situation to which Miss von Schwarzenberg was introduced as the latest in a long and sorry line.
Napier had watched the transformation.
"They've raised the Schwarzenberg's salary twice." She had subdued every member of the minister's household.
"Not you, I hope?" Julian said quickly.
Napier laughed. "She would set your mind at rest on that score. Only the other day she got me into a corner. 'What have you got against me, Mr. Napier?' she said. 'You don't like me.' It took me so by surprise, I stammered: 'I?... What an idea!' 'Why don't you like me, Mr. Napier?' Mercifully just then Wildfire McIntyre flamed across our path."