CHAPTER XXII.
I LOVE YOU.
It was two years later. Captain Fordyce and his wife were in London, walking leisurely in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace.
There was a drawing-room going on, and they gazed curiously at the long line of carriages drawn up outside the palace; and not only at them, but oftentimes into them.
The carriage occupants took their scrutiny as a matter of course. “’Steban,” said his wife, trying to draw him away from what she feared was a too noticeably disapproving survey of the thin shoulders of an emaciated dowager, “what can be going on in this carriage? There is quite a crowd about it.”
Looking over the heads of some small urchins in the gutter, they saw two very pretty girls, who were disposing of sandwiches in an exceedingly well-bred manner.
“Slaves to fashion!” remarked Captain Fordyce. “How would you like to be in there, Nina?”
“To sit in a stiff dress and hold a bouquet is not my idea of happiness,” she said, smilingly; “yet if I were as lovely as those girls—”
“They have not a tithe of your good looks,” he said, with a genuine masculine depreciation of the thing that did not belong to him. Then, turning his back on the fascinating demoiselles, he stifled a yawn, and, consulting his watch, asked whether she did not wish to go back to their hotel.
“Yes, if you like,” she said, amiably, pausing to cast a glance into a near-by carriage. Within it, seated beside an officer in a military uniform, was a lady magnificent in ostrich plumes and a gleaming white satin, the train of which was heaped up in billowy white waves on the seat in front of her.
Nina uttered a delighted shriek, and the next instant her head disappeared through the open carriage window, and she was embracing her old friend, Lena Marsden.