“They’ve been married nearly four months now, haven’t they? Sapristi! How time flies! A chance meeting ... a hot-headed Muscovite ... a level-headed Britisher, an infinitesimal courtship, a consent from the Czar, a splendid wedding-feast, a short trip to one’s vasty estates, and here is our interesting couple royally established in the Faubourg St.-Germain, and cradled by the town of revolutions, where they will doubtless dominate chic and fashion. Ah, there’s no denying it! Your Loris knows how to paddle her own canoe.”
“You never did like Laurence!” Marguerite observed.
“No, I never did; I don’t mind owning up to that; and the high-handed way in which she landed one of the greatest matrimonial prizes in Europe did not improve my admiration, either. A girl as competent as she proved herself to be before twenty promises for the future.”
Marguerite was turning her horses from the departmental road into one which opened upon it at right angles, and made a short cut to Plenhöel across the heath. This delicate operation might, therefore, have excused her silence, but her father did not think so.
“Oh, hang it all, ‘Gamin’!” he exclaimed. “You know what I mean, in spite of your sugar-candy airs! You won’t tell me that you were pleased with her—or him, either, for the matter of that; else why did you refuse to go to the marriage on the plea of ill-health? You pleading ill-health! Preposterous! However, I thought that perhaps by now you had forgiven and forgotten, and that you might be pleased to see them once more.”
Had her father looked at her now he would have noticed the wave of delicate color rising on what was visible of her face; but he was irritably drawing his cigarette-case from a recalcitrant inner pocket, and did not see.
“Forgive—forget? What in the world have I to forgive or forget, papa?” she asked, glancing at the somber dried heather rustling along both sides of the road into misty distances. “What indeed; since it was I who at Cousin Basil’s request first spoke to Laurence of his ‘intentions’ regarding her?”
“Antinoüs,” a cigarette in one hand and a vesta-box in the other, veered abruptly in his seat, and stared at his daughter with something akin to consternation in his eyes.
“You!” he exclaimed. “Why I never heard a word of all this! What an idea, to make a baby like you his messenger, instead of asking me!”
“Well, he thought you’d laugh at him,” Marguerite frankly replied.