The Younger took his pink with a laugh. “Then you have been making the other thing. Have you asked her yet?”
“No. But it comes to the same. I have sounded her.”
“O! And she rang true? How did you manage it?”
The Elder took his step without a tremour. “I offered her a present and she accepted it.”
The Younger left him an instant in his security.
“Yes? What was it?”
“An antique pendant. At this moment it is hanging against her heart.”
The Younger took this picture in, but he repressed a laugh.
“My dear marquis, you might give her seventy-three pendants, and I presume her heart is large enough to hang all of them against it. But that would prove nothing.”
The Elder looked reproach before he proffered it: