“Poor lord!” said Jane, with a revulsion of feeling; she had been hating the stranger with all her dynamic force. “She’s held on to her orders, and made him go back to New York! Of course I’m thankful, but you can see he isn’t.”
“Well, I think it’s perfectly great to have a lover, provided you send him off! I like something like this going on in the house, as long as it goes the wrong way—for him,” declared Florimel.
Mary and Jane were convulsed over this speech and responded to their mother’s summons to bid Lord Kelmscourt good-bye with lips that would twitch, and with cheeks reddened by amusement over Florimel’s original views of a romance.
“Good-bye, Miss Garden, good-bye, Miss Jane Garden. Good-bye, Miss Florimel Gypsy! We had a pleasant trip, we four, in the car, didn’t we? I’m sorry not to teach you to drive it, Miss Jane. Mr. Garden will do that. I hope to see you again. I’m to be allowed to visit Vineclad before I sail for home, ‘if I like.’ Do you think I shall not ‘like,’ Mary?” Lord Wilfrid said, not noticing that he had dropped his more formal address to Mary, won by the kindly blue eyes in the sweet young face smiling at him.
“I’m sure that you will come and that we shall all be glad to see you,” said Mary.
“You dear girl!” said Lord Kelmscourt, with a farewell grip of Mary’s soft hand that underscored his words.
Mr. and Mrs. Moulton came over to Hollyhock house that night, as they usually did, to sit in the garden, now rioting with midsummer bloom, for the beneficent hours of the first darkness after a warm day. They heard the story of the disguised chauffeur with the amusement that the girls knew that he would feel, on Mr. Moulton’s part, and the impatience which they were equally sure his wife would feel.
“Such nonsense!” she cried. “I’m glad you sent him right about, Lynette!”
“Oh, but he will come back!” protested Mrs. Garden mischievously, swung to the other side by this injudicious remark.
“I think he was a trump!” said Mark, who always came when the Moultons did, and just as surely when they did not. “He’s got the right idea; better be original, if it isn’t too sensible. You’ve got to remember him now, and talk about him, and maybe that was what he was after.”