Lily’s eyes filled with tears. How very good this quaint, whimsical, elderly Frenchman had been to her!
Looking back, as they often do look back, to their strange wedding day, both Angus and Lily Stuart always agree that in many ways it was Papa Popeau, rather than the bridegroom, who had seemed the hero of the occasion. It was he who appeared the central figure of the quaint little group gathered together round the temporary altar which had been set up that day in the hotel where the British chaplain, during that first winter after the War, officiated.
As was but fitting, the Frenchman was best man to his Scots friend, and to everybody’s amazement he had appeared garbed in ancient dress clothes, with, on his breast, the Cross of the Legion of Honour and the Military Cross!
It was Papa Popeau also who presided at the wedding feast which took place just after the wedding in a private room at the Hôtel de Paris. It was he who put the bride, looking radiantly happy and wearing her superb ermine coat over her old frock—for she felt as if she never wanted to see any of the lovely clothes she had bought with Aunt Cosy again—into the luxurious motor which somehow or other he had managed to procure for the happy pair at very short notice.
In fact, so extraordinarily brilliant were Papa Popeau’s various improvisations, and so artful the way in which he had managed to persuade everybody to do exactly what he wanted done, that Mr. Bowering muttered to Angus Stuart: “I begin to see why France won the Battle of the Marne.”
But it was fortunate, perhaps, that Lily did not overhear the final words which Hercules Popeau exchanged with the English solicitor after the two had watched the motor-car containing the now married lovers speeding towards Italy:
“And now, dear sir, while you go back to the fogs of Albion, I will return to the more congenial task of seeing that the Countess Polda is well and truly guillotined!”
THE END