“No clothes?” she suggested, with a smile that made him tingle to his finger-tips.
“Absolutely nothing to wear!”
“How shocking! But never mind; I shall tell them all that they are lucky not to have you in overalls and mining-boots—or don’t you wear mining-boots on bridges? However, you needn’t worry; you won’t have any chance to be social, unless it’s at dinner. Father will monopolize you.”
“What is he going to do to me; fire me?”
The limousine had reached the northward lake drive, and the king’s daughter pressed the bell-push for more speed. “Dinner will be waiting,” she explained. Then she answered his question. “It’s a perfectly profound secret, of course, but I really believe you are going to be ‘fired.’”
“That is a nice, comforting thing to be told—just before dinner!” he laughed. “But my obsequies are of no special consequence; tell me about yourself. Is the English lord still hovering upon the horizon?”
“Cumberleigh? What do you know about him?”
“Oh, nothing much; I merely heard last summer that you were going to marry him.”
“When I do, you shall have a handsomely engraved invitation to the wedding—for the sake of the past-and-gone kiddie times in old Middleboro. Won’t that console you?”
“I am consoled speechless. Weddings and funerals always affect me that way, and the Cumberleigh occasion will be both, from my point of view.”