What worries me isn't so much to-day's meetings. It's to-morrow's. If we can't dodge him at Dieppe, how shall we manage at Sainte Véronique? Then there's my ridiculous promise to our poor young Bishop Gibson.
I'm forced to acknowledge that Alice is right. I'm neither old enough nor wise enough to keep up Traxelby and go travelling abroad with no companion save Susan. It looks strange, and it doesn't work.
If this creature is indeed Lord Ruddington, I don't trust him to deal honestly by Susan. In that case, Gibson is just the man for the job. Once let me be sure that it's Ruddington and Gibson shall have his telegram within half an hour.
Half-past three.
I've laughed and I've cried.
To think that all last night and all this morning I fully believed we were deep in Act III. of a tragedy (Act I.: Miss Langley's Boudoir at Traxelby Grange. Act II.: The Grange Garden); and that when I walked into the salle-à-manger for déjeuner and saw the Brute in Grey at a corner table, my mind was so prepared for an ultimate Act V., that the only uncertainty was as to whether Gibson would do it with a revolver or with a knife!
It isn't Act III., and there isn't any tragedy. It turns out to be merely the comic relief of a melodrama.
He was already lunching when I sat down with Susan at my table. Of course I placed Susan with her back to him; but I didn't notice at first that I had also placed her opposite a mirror wherein she could look at him far better than I could myself.
He was too far off for me to hear him clearly; but I made out that he insistently addressed his English waiter in lamentable French. I hung my head for my country and its aristocracy, and thought more meanly than ever of its public schools. He consumed a succession of expensive dishes, and his plate was ostentatiously flanked by a bottle of champagne.
"It's a whole bottle, Miss," whispered Susan, regarding it with reverence in the mirror; "not one of those little ones."