“I have been intimate with Archie from the cradle,” said David, “but I am still very shy about forming opinions as to his mental processes. In this case, however, I think it is safe to say he didn’t suspect—and still doesn’t suspect.”
“Poor old Archie,” mused Adele, with a ripening smile. “I knew who he was before I’d even laid eyes on him. A school-friend of mine in Galveston wrote to me that she had met a real Earl, who insisted on being known as Mr. Linkhaw, and that he was returning to England by way of Kentucky. I’ve had three months of the rarest fun in never letting on that I had the remotest suspicion. You can’t imagine how comical it was. He used to get, quite tearful sometimes, I abused the aristocracy so fiercely. And then, the joke was, papa began—his whole idea of conversation is to take up to-day what I’ve said yesterday, and multiply my words by a hundred and twelve, and produce the result as his own; and he worked up the anti-Earl agitation till Archie very nearly went off into chronic melancholia. It was better than any comedy that ever was written—but then you stumbled your way into the middle of it, and got it all twisted and tangled up—and it hasn’t been so amusing since then.”
“My dear Miss Skinner,” protested David, “I think my entrance upon the scene deserves a gentler verb. If you will search your memory, you will find that I came in by express invitation. It was you who deliberately thrust my mock honours upon me.”
“Oh, I know that,” she responded, readily enough. “I thought that would only make the thing funnier still—but somehow it hasn’t. It isn’t anything about Archie and me, you know. But there is another element in the case that I feel very keenly about. It has been puzzling me for days, but I only learned the truth last night. I simply made papa tell me. I refused flat-footed to come here to-day, or to do anything else that was reasonable, unless he did tell me. I have a cousin here in England, Mr. Mosscrop, a daughter of my father’s own brother, and she is one of the dearest girls that ever lived.”
“I can readily credit that,” declared David, pointing his meaning with a little inclination of the head.
“Oh, she is far nicer than I am,” cried Adele. “She wouldn’t trifle with the feelings of the man she loved, or play tricks with him just for the sake of fun. In fact, I almost blame her for taking such things too seriously. She hasn’t had too easy a time of it, poor girl, and it has made her, I think, altogether too humble. She met a young man in the midst of her troubles who, it seems, was civil to her, and even kind as men go, and what does she do but just sit down and worship the very memory of him, and cry out her pretty blue eyes over it—and he—he walks off and never gives her another thought. That’s the man of it!”
A gleam of indignation flashed through the moisture in her own eyes as she bent them upon her companion. Her bosom heaved the more as she discerned a broad smile extending itself upon his face.
“Although I might demur to details,” he said, restraining the gaiety which struggled for expression in his voice, “I must not pretend to fail to recognise the portrait you have drawn. I am the guilty man!”
“You laugh at it!” she exclaimed. “To you it seems a joke!”
“Are you so certain that there isn’t a joke concealed somewhere about it?” he suggested, calmly.