CHAPTER XXIII
To draw the sting, withouten fail
Endeth the evil; and this tale.
“Isn’t he a beauty?” the “Gamin” asked, lifting her baby from the great white blanket upon which he was crawling about, and flourishing him in her extended arms toward Pavlo, who had arrived an hour before from Salvières.
“Man or woman?” the young officer demanded, somewhat peremptorily. “I can never remember the sex of a thing not old enough to wear trousers.”
“Awfully stupid of you!” Marguerite contemptuously commented. “Especially since he bears your name, and you were his proxy-godfather, mon ami!”
“That’s true, too!” admitted Pavlo, more meekly. “Proxy-godfather—not godfather by proxy. There’s a difference.”
“A very serious nuance,” Marguerite reprehended; “you had the honor of proxyfying (Lord! I wonder if that’s the right way to put it?) His Majesty the Autocrat of All the Russias, and came loaded down with offerings like the Magi. Whew! You mind that golden christening-goblet studded with clear-set rubies and diamonds as big as haricot beans? It was a sore temptation not to have them strung into a necklace for myself.”
“As if your jewel-coffers were not teeming and running over already,” he scoffed. “Don’t forget your own little cadeau-de-relevailles from the same Imperial source, Madame la Princesse Palitzin. Pearls the size of hazelnuts—large hazelnuts at that—are not picked up in the hoof-prints of a pack-mule.” And he pointed to the strands coiled about her white neck beneath the sheer ananas-batiste of her corsage. “Why, they reveal their orient, smoored as they are by this stuff you wear.”
“Smoored,” she shrugged. “Who ever heard of speaking so insolently of autocratic pearls?”
Marguerite, though transformed by the plenitude of her happiness, was never more than now deserving of her nickname of “Moonglade.” Standing there on the broad terrace of La Tour du Chevalier, she looked every bit as young as she had done when Basil had visited her at the Hôtel de Plenhöel just after his marriage with Laurence Seton. Slender, erect, ethereal as ever, and dainty with the daintiness of a flower, there was nothing full-blown as yet about this Marguerite of Marguerites, and her father, walking up from the plaisance, smiled with pride as he saw her.