Lord Rupert clasped his head in his hands. “Hang me, if I know what you’re about, Léonie!” he said. “Here’s me dragged out of England to help you save the Cub from an adventuress, as I thought, and now you say the boy’s to marry her!”
Léonie paid not the slightest heed to this. She went on pacing the room until suddenly an idea came to her, and she stopped short. “Rupert, Juliana is in Paris!”
“What of it?” said his lordship.
“But do you not see, that if Vidal has been staying here of course Juliana has met him?”
“Do you think she might know why the plaguey boy has gone off to Dijon?” inquired Rupert hopefully. “That’s what bothers me. Why Dijon?”
Léonie wrinkled her brow in a puzzled manner. “But why, Rupert, is it Dijon that bothers you? I find the whole of this affair so very strange and without reason that for Dominique to have gone to Dijon is a bagatelle.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Rupert said. “It’s such a devilish queer place to go to. Dijon! What in the fiend’s name would anybody want there? I’ll tell you what it is, Léonie, the boy’s behaving mighty oddly.” He shook his head. “The ninth earl was given to these turns, so they say. It’s a bad business.”
Léonie stared at him. Lord Rupert tapped his forehead significantly. Léonie said in great indignation: “Are you telling me that my son is mad?”
“We’ll hope he ain’t,” Rupert said pessimistically, “but you can’t deny he’s behaving in a manner no one would call sane. Dijon! Why, it’s absurd!”
“If you were not Monseigneur’s brother, Rupert, I should have one big quarrel with you. Mad! Voyons, he is not so mad as you, for you have not any sense at all. Let us go to find Juliana.”