“Jean’s wife is my sister, Mr. Bayne,” Miss Falconer said.
CHAPTER XXVI
AN UNEXPECTED VISIT
I don’t know what they thought of me, probably that I was crazy. For a good minute, a long sixty seconds, I simply stood and stared. The duke’s blue uniform, his wife’s black-gowned figure, and the white, radiant blur that was Miss Falconer revolved about me in spinning, starry circles. I gasped, put out a hand, fortunately encountered Dunny’s shoulder, and, leaning heavily on that perplexed person, at last got back my intelligence and my breath.
“Won’t you shake hands with me, Mr. Bayne?” smiled the Duchess of Raincy-la-Tour.
I was virtually sane again.
“I do hope,” I said, “that you will forgive me. Not that I see the slightest reason why you should, I am sure. Life is too short to wipe out such a bad impression. I know how you’ll remember me all your days; as an idiot with a head done up in layers of toweling, wobbling on two crutches and gaping at you like a fish.”
But the duchess was still holding my hand in both of hers and smiling up at me from a pair of great, dark, tender eyes, the loveliest pair of eyes in the world, bar one. No, bar none, to be quite fair. The Firefly’s wife, most people would have said, was more beautiful than her sister; but then, beauty is what pleases you, as some wise man remarked long ago.
“I don’t believe, Mr. Bayne,” she was saying gently, “that I shall ever remember you in any unpleasant way. You see, I know about those bandages, and I know why you need those crutches. Even if you were vain, you wouldn’t mind the things I think of you—not at all.”