With such bad grace Armstrong agreed to accompany his bride and her father home. Captain Garth was fully determined to keep Wallace securely under his eye until he saw the newly-married pair safely on board the boat bound for England. He had had some experience of the young man's moods, and knew that he was quite capable of getting extremely intoxicated in the town out of mere bravado, and in that condition presenting himself at the boat, or even, at the worst, of forgetting that appointment altogether.
"Poor little girl! She's caught a Tartar!" was Mitcham's mental comment, as he took leave of the bridal party, who, in another fiacre, splashed their way back to the High Town.
Here the little bride was dismissed to her room, to complete her packing. But, most unluckily for the plans of Messrs. Armstrong and Garth, it so chanced that almost as soon as Laline arrived up-stairs, and before she had even removed her hat, she remembered that she had left her keys in the salle-à-manger below, and forthwith she descended in search of them.
Nell the cat and her kitten were playing on the floor of the salle, and the little bride slipped on her knees beside them to bid them an affectionate and tearful farewell. Nell's kitten had an untidy habit of dragging any plaything it could find from one room to another about the house; as she caressed it, Laline remembered that her three keys on a little piece of string were among the kitten's favourite toys, which might account for the fact that they were at this present moment nowhere to be found.
On consulting Bénoîte, the latter declared that she had seen the "le p'tit chat" amusing itself with some keys on the floor of the salon that morning; but, as she never meddled with anything of Monsieur's, she had not rescued them. Clearly the salon was the place to search for the missing keys, and with that idea Laline turned the handle of her father's den.
The two men were sitting by Garth's desk with their heads bent over a paper; close at hand stood the cognac, a syphon, and two well-filled glasses. They seemed absorbed in the contents of the paper before them, and did not hear Laline's timid turning of the handle of the door. Before, however, she had opened it sufficiently wide to enable her to enter, some words, loudly spoken in her bridegroom's voice, arrested her attention, and made her suddenly stop as though turned to stone.
"You've only got to alter the date of the certificate from the thirtieth of August to the thirtieth of July, and the thing is done. I wrote to my uncle that I was married and that my wife was starving just twenty-four days ago. I didn't say how long I'd been married; and, as I landed at Marseilles in the middle of July on my way to Paris, I should have had plenty of time to get on here and through the ceremony by the thirtieth. Of course, Laline doesn't look as if she were starving, though I think you've kept her pretty short in the matter of food. But, if she's only sea-sick, she may look woebegone enough for the character!"
"Your difficulty will be," said Garth, "to persuade her to back you up in those few little necessary lies. For one thing, I have stated her age as seventeen; for another, she must be made to understand that she's been married a month, and has been starving in Boulogne for some days. But your toughest job will be to induce her to state that she's the orphan daughter of a clergyman, and that she met you coming home from Australia. It's almost a pity to have left all these very important details to the last moment."
"It's all the fault of that humbugging training of hers," growled Armstrong. "But I'm not going to let any whimpering school-girl spoil my prospects. Laline's my wife, and she's got to obey me. I shall impress upon her that my uncle, who is very particular, would never forgive me for marrying the daughter of such a man as you, ex-keeper of a gambling-club, where I got fleeced and ruined five years ago,—a man who daren't show his face in England; and I shall assure her that I invented this story of a dead parson-father in order to spare her natural feelings."
"Stop a bit!" exclaimed Garth, whose flesh-tints had deepened from crimson to purple while Armstrong was speaking. "I draw the line at that. It's bad enough to be deprived of my daughter's companionship; but I won't have her mind poisoned against me; understand that! You can tell her that I am connected with the turf, as I suggested before, and that your uncle has a Puritanical horror of horse-racing. But I won't have my memory blackened in the mind of the only kith-and-kin I have in the world!"