"Captain Audaine," Mr. Vanringham resumed, with more tranquillity, "you are correct. Clidamira and Parthenissa would never have fled into the night without leaving a note upon the pin-cushion. The folly I kindled in your wife's addled pate has proven my ruin. Remains to make the best of Hobson's choice." He unlocked the door. "Gentlemen, gentlemen!" says he, with deprecating hand, "surely this disturbance is somewhat outré, a trifle misplaced, upon the threshold of a bridal-chamber?"
Then Gerald Allonby thrust into the room, followed by Lord Humphrey Degge, [Footnote: I must in this place entreat my reader's profound discredit of any aspersions I may rashly seem to cast upon this honest gentleman, whose friendship I to-day esteem as invaluable; but I wrote, as always, currente calamo, and the above was penned in an amorous misery, sub Venire, be it remembered; and in such cases a wrong bias is easily hung upon the mind.—F.A.] my abhorred rival for Dorothy's affection, and two attendants.
"My grandmother!" shrieks Gerald. "Villain, what have you done with my grandmother?"
"The query were more fitly put," Vanringham retorts, "to the lady's husband." And he waves his hand toward me.
Thereupon the new-comers unbound me with various exclamations of wonder. "And now," I observed, "I would suggest that you bestow upon Mr. Vanringham and yonder blot upon the Church of England the bonds from which I have been recently manumitted, or, at the very least, keep a vigilant watch upon those more than suspicious characters, the while that I narrate the surprising events of this evening."
VI
Subsequently I made a clean breast of affairs to Gerald and Lord Humphrey Degge. They heard me with attentive, even sympathetic, countenances; but by and by the face of Lord Humphrey brightened as he saw a not unformidable rival thus jockeyed from the field; and when I had ended, Gerald rose and with an oath struck his open palm upon the table.
"This is the most fortunate coincidence," he swears, "that I have ever known of. I come prepared to find my grandmother the wife of a beggarly play-actor, and I discover that, to the contrary, she has contracted an alliance with a gentleman for whom I entertain sincere affection."
"Surely," I cried, aghast, "you cannot deliberate acceptance of this iniquitous and inadvertent match!"
"What is your meaning, Captain Audaine?" says the boy, sharply. "What other course is possible?"'