"You are a wonder, John,—a sure enough wonder. Why, hang it all, she doesn't even let dad do that."
But Jasper, Jr., was very young and he couldn't understand.
At last we were to ourselves, my extensive household and I. Late that night I sat in my study considering the best means of reducing my staff of servants and in computing, with dismay, the cost of being a princely host to people who had not the least notion what it meant to do sums in economic subtraction. It was soon apparent to me that retrenchment, stern and relentless, would have to follow upon my wild though brief season of profligacy. I decided to dismiss the scullery-maid.
I was indescribably lonely. Poopendyke was worried about my pallor, my lassitude. At the end of a week, he took it upon himself to drop a line to the Hazzards, urging them to run out for a visit in the hope that company might take me out of myself. All attempts to renew my work on the ill-fated novel met with utter failure. The power of mental concentration was gone. I spent most of my time in the garden.
The Hazzards came and with them the joyously beautiful Betty Billy. Poopendyke must have prepared them for the task in hand, for they proceeded at once to transform the bleak, dreary old castle into a sort of hilarious merry-go-round, with me in the very vortex of it all. They succeeded in taking me "out of myself," I will say that for them. My spirits took an upward bound and, wonderful to relate, retained their altitude in spite of all I could do to lower them. I did not want to be happy; I figured that I owed it to my recently aroused temperament to be permanently unhappy. But the wind blew another way and I drifted amiably with it, as a derelict drifts with the currents of the ocean but preferably with the warm gulf stream.
We had word from Mrs. Titus, in London, that negotiations had been reopened with the Count, and that a compromise might be expected. The obdurate nobleman had agreed, it seemed, to meet Jasper Titus's lawyers in Paris at no distant date. My chief concern however was for the Countess herself. That she had successfully reached the high seas was apparent; if not, the newspapers, which I read with eagerness, would have been filled with accounts of her seizure. We eagerly awaited the promised cablegram from New York, announcing her safe arrival there.
Smith joined us at the end of the week. I nerved myself to question him about the Englishman.
"Splendid fellow," said he, with discouraging fervour. "One of the finest chaps I know, eh, George?"
"For an Englishman," admitted Hazzard.
"He's a gentleman, and that's more than you can say for the rag-tag of nobility that paid court to Aline Tarnowsy. He was in love with her, but he was a gentleman about it. A thoroughbred, I say."