"With my left hand, too," I said wonderingly. Catching myself up, I hastily changed the subject.
A little later on, as Colingraft left the room, slyly feeling of his jaw, Jasper, Jr. whispered to me excitedly: "You've got him eating out of your hand, old top."
Things were coming to a pretty pass, said I to myself when I was all alone. It certainly is a pretty pass when one knocks down the ex-husband and the brother of the woman he loves, and quite without the least suspicion of an inherited pugnacity.
I had a little note from the Countess that afternoon, ceremoniously delivered by Helene Marie Louise Antoinette. It read as follows:
"You did Colingraft a very good turn when you laid him low this morning. He is tiresomely interested in his prowess as a box-maker, or a boxster, or whatever it is in athletic parlance. He has been like a lamb all afternoon and he really can't get over the way you whacked him. (Is whack the word?) At first he was as mum as could be about it, but I think he really felt relieved when I told him I had seen the whole affair from a window in my hall. You see it gave him a chance to explain how you got in the whack, and I have been obliged to listen to intermittent lectures on the manly art of self-defence all afternoon, first from him, then from Jappy. I have a headache, and no means of defence. He admits that he deserved it, but I am not surprised. Colly is a sporting chap. He hasn't a mean drop of blood in his body. You have made a friend of him. So please don't feel that I hold a grudge against you for what you did. The funny part of it all is that mamma quite agrees with him. She says he deserved it! Mamma is wonderful, really, when it comes to a pinch. She has given up all thought of 'putting a foot outside the castle.' Can you have luncheon with us to-morrow? Would it be too much trouble if we were to have it in the loggia? I am just mad to get out-of-doors if only for an hour or two in that walled-in spot. Mr. Poopendyke has been perfectly lovely. He came up this morning to tell me that you haven't sneezed at all and there isn't the remotest chance now that you will have a cold. It seems he was afraid you might. You must have a very rugged constitution. Britton told Blake that most men would have died from exposure if they had been put in your place. How good you are to me.
"ALINE T."
"P. S.—I may come down to see you this evening."
* * * * * * *
I shall skip over the rather uninteresting events of the next two or three days. Nothing of consequence happened, unless you are willing to consider important two perfectly blissful nights of sleep on my part. Also, I had the pleasure of taking the Countess "out walking" in my courtyard, to use a colloquialism: once in the warm, sweet sunshine, again 'neath the glow of a radiant moon. She had not been outside the castle walls, literally, in more than five weeks, and the colour leaped back into her cheeks with a rush that delighted me. I may mention in passing that I paid particular attention to her suggestion concerning my dilapidated, gone-to-seed garden, although I had been bored to extinction by Jasper, Jr. when he undertook to enlighten me horticulturally. She agreed to come forth every day and assist me in building the poor thing up; propping it, so to speak.
As for Mrs. Titus, that really engaging lady made life so easy for me that I wondered why I had ever been apprehensive. She was quite wonderful when "it came to a pinch." I began to understand a good many things about her, chief among them being her unvoiced theories on matrimony. While she did not actually commit herself, I had no difficulty in ascertaining that, from her point of view, marriages are not made in heaven, and that a properly arranged divorce is a great deal less terrestrial than it is commonly supposed to be. She believed in matrimony as a trial and divorce as a reward, or something to that effect.