"The merest curiosity, mon ami. You, having been absent from Paris, have not heard our latest sensation. Sir Edward Rivington was abducted nearly a week ago, and you and I are two of the very few who know where he is."
"Impossible!"
"May be, but true. He has been abducted, and only we know by whom, and where he is to be found. Monsieur Roché, your chief, never believed in the rumor of abduction. He set it down as a subterfuge to delay the return of certain private papers intended for, no matter whom, that had fallen into Sir Edward's hands. Those papers, mon cher, that you delivered yesterday. The ones that concerned my visit to London. It might have been a wonderful thing for you, Gaspard, if you had not delivered them, but I did not mention your own interests."
"No interests of my own," he cried, laying his hand upon mine, "could have weighed like the heart-burning desire to serve you. There is nothing, that my honor would allow, that I would not do to win your faintest gratitude, and then count myself all too richly rewarded. Nothing I would not do—"
But fortunately we steamed into the Gare du Nord; Gaspard's poetic moment was ruined by a descent from the dizzy heights of sentiment to the commonplace confusion of an arrival platform, and, with a diplomat's smile at the inevitable, he accepted the position.
What creatures of impulse the sex we prefer must be. In a four hours' journey from Calais to Paris he must needs choose the last seventy seconds for serious conversation, in order to be interrupted at the instant when I was most attentive. And how those supreme moments, when lost, seem to be lost forever! Commonplaces, commonplaces, small talk and frivolity from Paris on to Versailles, from Versailles to the Chateau of le Duc d'Eautine.
I felt quite serious when he was speaking just before we arrived in Paris; but had he attempted to resume the subject I should have smiled, and he, wise in diplomacy beyond his years, realized the position, and accepted it.
Our carriage drove into the park of the Chateau, and, leaving the main drive, stopped, in a few minutes, where, in the shade of a magnificent cedar, a group of men were standing, evidently awaiting it. Le Duc d'Eautine, Monsieur Faudé, his bosom friend, and Sir Edward Rivington, the lost Ambassador, all seemingly charmed with one another's company, and only a suspicious-looking case, leaning against the tree, spoiled the harmony of the gathering.
It is a thing I have since almost boasted of. I am the only woman who has ever caused that paragon of courtesy, le Duc d'Eautine, to lose his temper and forget all etiquette.
"Sapristi!" he gasped, as I alighted—"what pleasantry is this, madame? And you, monsieur," he continued, fiercely, turning upon my poor Gaspard—"you, monsieur, explain this intrusion, or—"