“If there’s one thing I hate,” said Ann, “it’s being dished. I suppose I always knew it couldn’t last. It was too wonderful. You don’t know how kind he was in his ways, never wanting anything you didn’t want yourself. And that was awful, too, because it made you afraid to want anything. It seemed to shame you. He was always shaming me, and I did feel awful sometimes. But it was lovely when we went for rides on tops of buses.”
This appreciation of René’s qualities as a housemate seemed to bore old Martin, for he took up a newspaper and began making notes and calculations from the betting columns.
“Hullo!” he said. “This must be some connection of his. ‘Miss Janet Fourmy of Elgin, N.B.’ ‘Miss Fourmy,’ it says, ‘was a distinguished German and Italian scholar, a Goethe translator, a contributor to the Scottish Encyclo—’ what you may call it. ‘In her youth she was familiar with the famous Edinburgh circle which gathered round Maga and did much valuable philological work, and was for a time governess to the late Archbishop of Canterbury who never ceased to express his admiration for her intellect and gifts. She had many friendships with the interesting figures of her day, and it is believed that she has left some record of them.’”
“He told me about her,” said Ann. “He used to go and stay with her, and she used to read an Italian book called Dante, with the pages upside down. She was very old, but good to him, and she thought Lord John Russell was in love with her.”
“Lord who?”
“I don’t know who he was, but that’s the name. Renny says it was her weakness. She lived all alone, and it’s very dreary in the winter in Scotland. She had met a lot of lords in her time, and she liked to remember more than she’d met. And she’d never married, and Renny says she thought it sounded well to account for it by saying that Lord John Russell was in love with her. It wasn’t always him——”
“Well! the things women do think of. I shall say I remained a widower because of Madame Tussaud.”
“She was fond of Renny,” said Ann, and that seemed on her lips the noblest possible epitaph for old Janet. She added:
“Perhaps that’s where he’s gone.”