His manner had suddenly become confused, incoherent, tentative, utterly unlike his usual soldierly abruptness. He seemed to be drawing back from his first open and friendly impulse, and to be more anxious for some exposition of his companion’s sentiments than for an opportunity of expressing his own. George was quite ready to take up the challenge.
“An indiscretion, Colonel! It seems to have been a serious one. My wife signed her name at our wedding as Nouna Kilmorna.”
The Colonel started, taken quite off his guard.
“The d——l she did!” After a pause, he added: “Then, by Jove, she must know—— Oh, these women, these women, there’s no making a contract with them! They wriggle out of the terms of it like eels.”
“You are speaking of her mother?”
“Yes, confound her!”
The veteran’s philosophy, which he was fond of putting at the service of his friends, failed him at such a crisis as this, and left him at the mercy of the very commonest of all resources—interjectional expletives. But they did not serve the purpose of the simple explanation his hearer wanted.
“Things seem to point to a contract there is no wriggling out of,” Lauriston suggested, as respectfully as the nature of the hint allowed.
The Colonel looked at George, and saw that he was at bay.
“Perhaps I had better have made a clean breast of it before,” he admitted grimly; “only it’s one of those deuced awkward things a man always shunts as long as he can. I did go through a form of marriage with the—the lady’s mother.”