And she did not answer Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir’s letter, nor did she write to Boy.
The following week she started for New York with the Major and his niece, a pretty, bright little girl who was completely fascinated by Miss Letty’s charm and gentleness, and who obeyed her implicitly with devotion and tenderness at once,—and the only intimation Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir received of her departure was through a letter to her husband from Major Desmond, which of course she opened. It ran as follows:—
“Dear D’Arcy,
I’m off to America with a party of two or three friends, including Miss Leslie, who is kindly chaperoning my young niece Violet Morrison, whom I am going to place at a finishing school in New Jersey. I daresay you remember Jack Morrison of the Guards—this is his only child,—and I prefer an American education for girls to an English one. I hear your little chap has been sent to school in France—it’s a d——d shame to try and turn an upright-standing Briton into a French frog. Better by far have sent him to one of the first-class educational establishments in the States. However, I suppose your wife has different ideas to anyone else respecting the education of boys. Take my advice and don’t drink yourself into the lower regions—look after your own affairs, and attend to the education of the little chap whose appearance and conduct in this world you are answerable for. If he ever goes to the bad, it won’t be half as much his fault as yours. I always speak my mind, as you know—and I’m doing it now.
Yours truly,
Dick Desmond.”
Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir bridled with offence as she read these lines, but she put them calmly into her usual posting-place for other people’s letters—the fire,—and for once she was exceedingly annoyed. Her ordinary bland state of complacent self-satisfaction was seriously disturbed. Miss Leslie, instead of writing to express her grief and distress at Boy’s departure—instead of doing anything that she was expected to do—had actually packed up her things and gone to America! Did any one ever hear of such a thing! And who could tell!—she might take a fancy to Major Desmond’s niece and leave her all her money! And Boy would be done out of it! For this flabby-minded, inconsistent woman had convinced herself that Boy must inevitably be Miss Leslie’s heir in the long run. And now here was a most unexpected turn to affairs.
That night she wrote to Boy a letter in which the following passage occurred:—
“I do not think Miss Leslie is as fond of you as she professed to be, for she has never said one word about your going to school, or sent you any message. I hear she has gone to America with Major Desmond’s little niece, who is being taken out there to finish her education. It seems a funny place to send an English girl to school, but I suppose the Major thinks he knows best.”
Boy read this with the weary scorn that was becoming habitual with him. If America was a funny place to send an English girl to school at, he thought France was a still funnier place for an English boy. And Miss Letty “was not so fond of him as she professed to be,” wasn’t she? Boy thought he knew better. But if he was mistaken, it did not matter much. Nothing mattered now! He didn’t care! Not he! It was foolish to care about anything or anybody. So one of his schoolmates told him,—a wiry boy from Paris with dark eyes, curly black hair, and a trick of smiling at nothing, and shrugging his shoulders.
“Qu’est que c’est la vie?” this youthful satirist would say. “C’est vieux jeu!—bagatelle! Ouf! Une farce! Une comédie! Tout passe—tout casse!—et Dieu s’amuse!”