“Yes,” he accepted, “it was just that! I was mortified. You wouldn’t treat a beggar so. But she’s got too much sense to care.”
Eager to do the duchess justice, even though he was little by little being emancipated, he was all the more determined to be fair to her.
“It was too sweet of her not to mind. I dare say her check helped to soothe her feelings,” the woman said.
“You don’t know her,” he replied quietly. “She wouldn’t touch a cent.”
The duchess exclaimed in horror: “Then she did mind.”
And he returned slowly: “She’s eaten and drunk with kings, and if the king hadn’t gone so early you can bet he would have set the fashion differently. Let’s drop the question. She sent you back your check, and I guess you’re quits.”
With a sharp note in her voice she said: “I hope it won’t be in the papers that you drove bareheaded back to the hotel with her. Don’t forget that we are dining with the Galoreys, and it’s past seven.”
After Dan had left her, the duchess glanced over the dismantled room which the servants were already restoring to order. She was not at case and not at peace, but there was something else besides her tiff with Dan that absorbed her, and that was Galorey. She couldn’t quite shake him off. He was beginning to be imperious in his demands on her; and, in spite of her cupidity and her debts, in spite of the precarious position in which she found herself with Dan, she could not break with Galorey yet. She went up-stairs humming under her breath the ballad Letty Lane had sung in the music-room:
“And long will his lady look from the castle wall.”