“I’m sure Mr. Stuart would get on with him,” she thought, dimly foreseeing a day when Sir Henry and her new acquaintance would be brought together somehow.
César Castellani took immediate advantage of Lady Lochinvar’s invitation. He presented himself at the Palais Montano on the following afternoon, and he found Pamela established there as if she belonged to the house. It was she who poured out the tea, and dispensed those airy little hot cakes, which were a kind of idealised galette, served in the daintiest of doyleys, embroidered with Lady Lochinvar’s cipher and coronet.
Mr. and Mrs. Murray were there, and Malcolm Stuart, the chief charm of whose society seemed to consist in his exhibition of an accomplished Dandie Dinmont which usurped the conversation, and which Castellani would have liked to inocculate then and there with the most virulent form of rabies. Pamela squatted on a little stool at the creature’s feet, and assisted in showing him off. She had acquired a power over him which indicated an acquaintance of some standing.
“What fools girls are!” thought Castellani.
His conquests among women of maturer years had been built upon rock as compared with the shifting quicksand of a girl’s fancy. He began to think the genus girl utterly contemptible.
“He has but one fault,” said Pamela, when the terrier had gone through various clumsy evolutions in which the bandiness of his legs and the length of his body had been shown off to the uttermost. “He cannot endure Box, and Box detests him. They never meet without trying to murder each other, and I’m very much afraid,” bending down to kiss the broad hairy head, “that Dandie is the stronger.”
“Of course he is. Box is splendid for muscle, but weight must tell in the long-run,” replied Mr. Stuart.
“My grandmother had a Dandie whose father belonged to Sir Walter Scott,” began Mrs. Murray: “he was simply a per-r-r-fect dog, and my mamma—”
Castellani fled from this inanity. He went to the other end of the room, where Lady Lochinvar was listening listlessly to Mr. Murray, laid himself out to amuse her ladyship for the next ten minutes, and then departed without so much as a look at Pamela.
“The spell is broken,” he said to himself, as he drove away. “The girl is next door to an idiot. No doubt she will marry that sandy Scotchman. Lady Lochinvar means it, and a silly-pated miss like that can be led with a thread of floss silk. Moi je m’en fiche.”