"Ah, then you ought, if only to get a little experience before your own time comes, you know. Yes, you really ought to have been there. It was quite a foregone conclusion that you would be best man. It was so funny to see Colonel Lightmark in that rôle, with that young Mr. Sylvester giving away the bride. It would have been so much better if they could have changed parts."
"I am sorry to interrupt you," said Mr. Dollond, getting up and putting away his sketch-book; "I can't sketch; the place is full of locusts, and they are getting into my boots."
Mrs. Dollond started up, shaking her skirts apprehensively, with an affectation of horror.
"How I do hate jumping things! And, anyhow, I suppose we ought to be getting back to our hotel, or we shall be late for dinner. You don't know what Hugh can be like when one is late for dinner. He is capable of beginning without me."
Rainham had risen with a ready response to her words, bordering almost on the ludicrous; and half an hour later he was congratulating himself that at least six seats intervened between his place and that of Mrs. Dollond at the dinner-table.
And yet on the morrow he found himself, and not without a certain relief, sitting beside the mundane, little lady, and turning to her incessant ripple of speech something of the philosophic indifference to which her husband had attained, while a sturdy pair of gaily-caparisoned horses, whose bells made a constant accompaniment, not unpleasing in its preciseness, to the vagueness of Rainham's thought, hurried them over the dusty surface of the Cornice.
Certainly the excursion into which he had been inveigled, rather from indolence than from any freak of his inclination, afforded him, now that it was undertaken, a certain desultory pleasure to which he had long been a stranger. Into the little shrug, comic and valedictory, of Mrs. Dollond's shoulders, as they passed the Octroi, a gesture discreetly mocking of the conditions they had left, he could enter with some humour, the appreciation of a resident who still permitted himself at times the licence of a casual visitor on his domain.
"Tell me," Mrs. Dollond had asked, as they rattled out of the further gate of Ventimiglia, "why did the excellent lady who tried to monopolize conversation in the salon last night appear so scandalized when I told her where we were going? Was I—surely now, Mr. Rainham, I was not indiscreet?"
"Ah, Mrs. Dollond," said Rainham humorously, "you know it was a delicate subject. At our hotel we don't recognise Monte Carlo. We are divided upon the other topics in which we are interested: the intrigues of the lawn tennis club, and the orthodoxy of the English chaplain. But we are all orthodox about Monte Carlo, and Mrs. Engel is the pillar of our faith. We think it's——"
"The devil?" interrupted Mr. Dollond, bending forward a little, with his bland smile.