“'The Bishop of Battersea has much pleasure in accepting M. d'Haricot's kind invitation.'” I read, aloud. “Mon Dieu! I am to have a bishop to dinner in three days' time; and a bishop I have never invited!”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive!”
“Read your other letters. Possibly they will throw light upon this.”
I opened the next, and cried in bewilderment: “Sir Henry Horley has much pleasure also! But I have never asked him; I have only met him once at a country house!”
The Marquis smiled.
“Do not be too sure you have not asked these gentlemen,” he said.
“But I swear—”
“Read this!”
He handed me an invitation-card on which, to my utter consternation, I saw these words engraved: “Monsieur d'Haricot requests the pleasure of————company to dinner to meet—” and here followed a name it would be indecorous to reproduce in these frivolous memoirs, the name of that royal personage for whose cause we loyalists of France were striving!