"I take your point," said the other, with some haste, "and concede that you are, beyond any reasonable doubt, in the right. Within the hour I am off."
"Then all is well," said Captain Audaine.
But he was wrong in this opinion, so wrong that I confute him by subjoining his own account of what befell, somewhat later in the day.
I
'Twas hard upon ten in the evening (the Captain estimates) when I left Lady Culcheth's, [Footnote: Sir Henry Muskerry's daughter, of whom I have already spoken, and by common consent an estimable lady and a person of fine wit; but my infatuation for Lady Betty had by this time, after three nights with her, been puffed out; and this fortunate extinction, through the affair of the broken snuffbox, had left me now entirely indifferent to all her raptures, panegyrics, and premeditated artlessnesses.—F. A.] and I protest that at the time there was not a happier man in all Tunbridge than Francis Audaine.
"You haven't the king?" Miss Allonby was saying, as I made my adieus to the company. "Then I play queen, knave, and ace, which gives me the game, Lord Humphrey."
And afterward she shuffled the cards and flashed across the room a glance whose brilliance shamed the tawdry candles about her, and, as you can readily conceive, roused a prodigious trepidation in my adoring breast.
"Dorothy!—O Dorothy!" I said over and over again when I had reached the street; and so went homeward with constant repetitions of her dear name.
I suppose it was an idiotic piece of business; but you are to remember that I loved her with an entire heart, and that, as yet, I could scarcely believe the confession of a reciprocal attachment, which I had wrung from her overnight, to the accompaniment of Gerald's snoring, had been other than an unusually delectable and audacious dream upon the part of Frank Audaine.
I found it, then, as I went homeward, a heady joy to ponder on her loveliness. Oh, the wonder of her voice, that is a love-song! cried my heart. Oh, the candid eyes of her, more beautiful than the June heavens, more blue than the very bluest speedwell-flower! Oh, the tilt of her tiny chin, and the incredible gold of her hair, and the quite unbelievable pink-and-white of her little flower-soft face! And, oh, the scrap of crimson that is her mouth.