“Tony is going to call for you in a carriage at ten o'clock, and you three old gentlemen are going to drive in an open barouche with cigars, like a bean feast, to the malgamite works.”
“The description is fairly accurate,” admitted Major White, without looking up from his paper.
“And I imagine you are going to raise—Hail Columbia!”
He looked at her severely through his glass, and said nothing. She nodded in a friendly and encouraging manner, as if to intimate that he had her entire approval.
“Take my word for it,” she continued, turning to Joan, “Herr von Holzen is a shady customer. I know a shady customer when I see him. I never thought much of the malgamite business, you know, but unfortunately nobody asked my opinion on the matter. I wonder——” She paused, looking thoughtfully at Major White, who presently met her glance with a stolid stare. “Of course!” she said, in a final voice. “I forgot. You never think. You can't. Oh no!”
“It is so easy to misjudge people,” pleaded Joan, earnestly.
“It is much easier to see right through them, straight off, in the twinkling of a bedpost,” asserted Marguerite. “You will see, Herr von Holzen is wrong and Tony is right. And Tony will smash him up. You will see. Tony”—she paused, and looked up at the roof where the doves were cooing—“Tony knows his way about.”
Major White rose and laid aside his paper. Mr. Wade was coming down the iron steps that led from the verandah to the garden. The banker was cutting a cigar, and wore a placid, comfortable look, as if he had breakfasted well. Even as regards kidneys and bacon in a foreign hotel, where there is a will there is a way, and Marguerite possessed tongues. “I'll turn this place inside out,” she had said, “to get the old thing what he wants.” Then she attacked the waiter in fluent German.
Marguerite noted his approach with a protecting eye. “It's all solid common sense,” she said in an undertone to Joan, referring, it would appear, to his bulk.
In only one respect was she misinformed as to the arrangements for the morning. Tony Cornish was not coming to the hotel to fetch Mr. Wade and White, but was to meet them in the shadiest of all thoroughfares and green canals, the Koninginne Gracht, where at midday the shadows cast by the great trees are so deep that daylight scarcely penetrates, and the boats creep to and fro like shadows. This amendment had been made in view of the fact that Lord Ferriby was in the hotel, and was, indeed, at this moment partaking of a solemn breakfast in his private sitting-room overlooking the Toornoifeld.