After which, he assured her, the serenades under her window should not always be silent ones, and they went in search of the broken guitar.
Judge Clarkson was pacing the veranda with well concealed impatience. Colonel McVeigh’s ride had interfered with the business talk he had planned. Matthew Loring was decidedly irritable over it, and he, Clarkson, was the one who, with Gertrude, had to hear the complaints. But looking in Kenneth’s happy face he could not begrudge him those brief morning hours at Beauty’s side, and only asked his consideration for the papers at the earliest convenient moment, and at the same time asked if the cottage was really a safe place for so important a prisoner as Monroe.
“Perfectly safe,” decided McVeigh, “so safe that there is no danger of escape; and as I think over the whole affair I doubt if on trial anything in this world can save him.”
“Well, I should hate to take his chances in the next,” declared the Judge; “it seems so incredible that a man possessed of the courage, the admirable attributes you have always ascribed to him, should prove so unworthy––a broken parole. Why, sir, it is––is damnable, sir, damnable!”
Colonel McVeigh agreed, and Clarkson left the room without perceiving that Madame Caron had been a listener, but she came in, removing her gloves and looking at the tiny band of gold on her third finger.
“The Judge referred to Captain Monroe, did he not?” 353 she asked, glancing up at him. “Kenneth”––and her manner was delightfully appealing as she spoke his name in a shy little whisper, “Kenneth, there may be some horrible mistake. Your friend––that was––may be innocent.”
“Scarcely a chance of it, sweetheart,” and he removed her other glove and kissed her fingers, glancing around first, to see that no one was in sight.
She laughed at his little picture of nervousness, but returned to the subject.
“But if it were so?” she persisted; “surely you will not counsel haste in deciding so serious a matter?”
“At any rate, I mean to put aside so serious a subject of conversation on our wedding morning,” he answered, and she smiled back at him as she said: