She then answered a question of Captain Maudsley's and turned again to
Gaston.
"What will make me tire of it?" he inquired. She sipped her champagne musingly.
"Why, what is in you deeper than all this; with the help of some woman probably."
She looked at him searchingly, then added:
"You seem strangely like and yet unlike your father to-night."
"I am wearing his clothes," he said.
She had plenty of nerve, but this startled her. She shrank a little: it seemed uncanny. Now she remembered that ribbon in the button-hole.
"Poor Sophie!" she thought. "And this one will make greater mischief here." Then, aloud to him: "Your father was a good fellow, but he did wild things."
"I do not see the connection," he answered. "I am not a good man, and I shall do wilder things—is that it?"
"You will do mad things," she replied hardly above a whisper, and talked once more with Captain Maudsley. Gaston now turned to his grandfather, who had heard a sentence here and there, and felt that the young man carried off the situation well enough. He then began to talk in a general way about Gaston's voyage, of the Hudson's Bay Company, and expeditions to the Arctic, drawing Lady Dargan into the conversation.