“Lord, ma’am, do you tell me you’ll go off to France with him?”
“Why not?” demanded Léonie.
“But, aunt, it will be thought prodigious strange if it becomes known. People will think you have run away with my uncle. Moreover, I consider him a most unsuitable escort for any lady, accustomed as you are, my dear ma’am, to every delicate attention to her comfort.”
“I thank you, John, but I am quite in the way of running off to France with Rupert, and he will look after me very well,” said her grace. “And now, mon enfant, if I am not to murder you we will talk no more of Vidal, or of Rupert, or of anything.”
Some hours later aunt and nephew, each meticulously polite to the other, reached Lady Fanny’s house in town. It was the dinner hour, and her ladyship was about to sit down to a solitary meal when the Duchess came quickly into the dining-room.
“Oh, my dearest love!” exclaimed Fanny, embracing her. “Thank heaven you have come! It is all too, too true!”
Léonie flung off her cloak. “Tell me at once, Fanny; he has abducted her? Truly he has abducted her?”
“Yes,” Lady Fanny asseverated. “I fear so. That odious woman was here again to-day, and indeed she means mischief, and I don’t doubt she’ll make herself vastly unpleasant unless we can buy her off, which I thought of at once, only, my love, I do not know how in the world we are to do so unless you have a great deal of money by you, for I’ve not a penny. I declare I could kill Vidal! It is so unthinking of him to ravish honest girls — not that I believe she is honest for a moment, Léonie. The mother is a horrid, designing creature if ever I saw one, and oh, my dear, she brought the other sister here to-day, and ’twas that made me believe in her ridiculous story, for all I’m sure the most of it’s a pack of lies. The child is quite provokingly lovely, Léonie, and do you know, she makes me think of what I was at her age? As soon as I clapped eyes on her I saw that there was nothing could be more natural than for Vidal to be in love with her.” She broke off as the serving-man came into the room to lay two more covers, and begged Léonie to be seated. Further discussion being impossible before the servant, she began to talk of the latest town gossip, and even, for want of something to say, asked her son kindly whether he would not like to go to the Royal Society to-night. John deigned no reply, but when dinner was over he informed the two ladies that although it was unhappily out of his power to repair to the Royal Society, he proposed to occupy himself with a book in the library.
Upstairs in the privacy of her boudoir, Fanny poured out the rest of her tale. She said that Sophia Challoner had scarce opened her little sulky mouth, but she could vow the chit was furious at having Vidal stolen from her. “The veriest minx, my dear! Oh, I know the signs, trust me! If the sister is at all like her, and how can she not be? poor Vidal is most horridly taken in. There’s no doubt he took her off to Prance with him, for if he did not, where is she? What shall we do?”
“I am going to Paris,” Léonie said. “First I will see this Mrs. Challoner. Then I shall tell Rupert he must take me to France. If it is all true, and the girl is not a — what is the word, I want, please?”