“Don’t be ridiculous, and pass the cake,” laughed Peter. “Besides, all this doesn’t explain Stuart.”
“I don’t know much about Stuart; of course I was taken there as a child, but then——” Merle’s eyes grew large and wistful, “I wasn’t a child; I was a French doll, in beautiful, expensive clothes, and not allowed to romp with the other children. So I suppose Stuart despised me. In fact, he told me as much last night; that since we’ve been grown-up he has avoided me for fear I should break. He’s only three years down from Oxford.”
“So young? I took him for about thirty.”
“Twenty-five, I believe.”
“He mentioned Oxford—isn’t Nicole going to bring that cream?—but I doggedly refused to take notice. ’Varsity is the one subject I will not discuss with the initiated; I pronounce Magdalen as God meant it to be pronounced, mix up dons with proctors, and earn for myself undying contempt. So it’s better left alone.”
Nicole entered with the cream, and the intimation that Monsieur Heron desired to speak with Mademoiselle des Essarts on the telephone.
“The game commences in earnest,” laughed Merle. “But I don’t want to get up. You answer it, Peter.”
Peter, nothing loath, ran downstairs to the boudoir, and replaced Madame des Essarts at the mouthpiece: “Hello!”
“Hello—look here,” came Stuart’s unmistakable tones from the other end; tones veiling with the typical Oxford accent a curious eagerness as of a dog forever worrying and shaking a bone. “Look here, how’s my mother?”
“I’m not good at arithmetic.”