“What did you imagine?” she asked.
I endeavored to collect my wits.
“Who did you think I was?” she demanded.
“Mademoiselle,” I replied, “behold a crushed, a penitent, a ridiculous figure. I am even more ignorant of your virtuous country than I imagined. Forgive me, I implore you! I shall endow your mission with fifty pounds; I shall walk home barefoot; you have but to name my penance and I shall undergo it!”
Whether it was that my contrition was so complete or for some more flattering reason that I may not hint at, I cannot tell you to this day, but certainly Miss Kerry proved more lenient than I had any right to expect. Not that she did not give me as unpleasant a quarter of an hour as I have ever tingled through. I, indeed, got “what for,” as the English say. But before she left she had actually smiled upon me again and very graciously uttered the words, “I forgive you.”
As for myself, I became filled with a glow of penitence and admiration; the admiration being a kind of moral atonement which I felt I owed to this virtuous and beautiful girl. At that moment the seven virtues seemed incarnate in her, and the seven deadly sins in myself. I was in the mood to pay her some exaggerated homage; I had also consumed an entire bottle of champagne, and I offered her—my services in her mission to woman! I should be her secretary, I vowed. Touched by my earnestness, she at last accepted my offer, and when we parted and I walked home in the moonlight, I hummed an air from a splendid oratorio.
Though the hour was somewhat late when I got in, it seemed to me the commonest courtesy to pay another call upon General Sholto and inquire—after his health, for example. I called, I found him in, and not yet gone to bed as my presentiment had advised me, and in two minutes we happened to be talking about his niece.
It appeared that she was the orphan and only child of his sister, and that for some years Kate and her not inconsiderable fortune had been left in his charge, but from the first I fear that she had proved rather a handful for the old boy to manage.
“A fine girl, sir; a handsome girl,” he declared, “but a rum 'un if ever there was. I'd once thought of living together, making a home and all that; but, as I said, mossoo, she's a rum girl. You noticed her temper this morning? Hang it, I was ashamed of her!”
“Where is she, then?” I asked.