That morning's déjeuner was singularly devoid of gaiety. The conspirators looked guiltily at poor Dorris's empty place. Those of her father and mother were expected to be empty, else the execution could not have taken place. The lame lady innocently wondered what had become of Miss Boundrish, and mentioned having seen her in the grounds that morning. Even Major Norris enjoyed the absence of the strident voice and gurgling laugh less than he expected, and found fault with the weather, which was perfect, and the salad, which was not, characterizing both as rotten. The thin man, openly but dejectedly, laid a bunch of roses by the woman of mystery's plate, and observed plaintively to Ermengarde more than once upon the undesirability of lynch law, and the mistaken estimate by average Britons of the salutary effect of ragging on immature character.
"It is often unjust," he said, "and always goes too far. Though I don't know what we should have done at Winchester without it—even without the injustice and occasional savagery. Yes, Mrs. Allonby, the savagery. But that, I hear, is now very rare. You need not shrink from sending your boy to Winchester. It will make a man of him; though he will be let down very gently to what we were."
It was during this discourse that Ermengarde discovered what she had been too much preoccupied while assisting at the execution of Miss Boundrish to think out before, though all the time she had been conscious of a subtle change in the thin man's appearance—a change so great that every one who saw him that morning was so much struck by it as to look twice, even three times at him—his beard was gone. Now why, she pondered, had Mr. Welbourne's beard taken sudden flight? Had he foreboded a personal encounter with Miss Boundrish, and thought it well to give as little hold to her vengeance as possible?
"Ah!" she said, suddenly divining another cause, "I see that you are no longer afraid of sore throat, Mr. Welbourne. That is good. First, because it means that your health is restored, secondly, because it is a portent of spring."
"Sore throat?" he murmured, bewildered. "The Riviera throat only comes in the first weeks. But——" his hand suddenly went up to the newly reaped chin, when crimson of the deepest dye suffused and betrayed him. "Quite so," he added vaguely—"yes; it—it was a protection—oh!—the mistral—ah—invalid ways—indolence——"
"I congratulate you on all counts," she said in a kind voice, wondering who was the object of Mr. Welbourne's passion, a sudden paralyzing fear suggesting herself. But no; that would be too terrible; M. Isidore, the Anarchist and the thin man, in those few, short weeks—Fate could hardly be so cruel as all that! And at his age! But he looked horribly young without the beard, and there was a certain gallant and knightly suggestion in the elegantly trimmed moustache left. There was no doubt that the thin man—no longer so thin and not at all so lame—was going forth in that moustache, conquering and to conquer. He had been heard to condemn the present clean-shaven mode as womanish. She had perhaps been too filial, too confiding with him, under the shadow of that venerable beard, and he had mistaken her. Then her eyes fell on the roses by Agatha's plate; she remembered that those two had often been elaborately unconscious of each other's presence lately; she remembered a long succession of gentle judgments on the woman of mystery's vagaries, and many delicate allusions to her beauty and charm, and in a flash she knew. Poor Mr. Welbourne! This was indeed tragedy.
After a sketchy and unsatisfactory déjeuner, during which appetite and peace were alike annihilated by that dread pronouncement of Madame Bontemps "inveigling the fiancé and breaking the heart of an innocent young girl," ringing through her brain, Ermengarde, renouncing her intention of looking for quarters in Mentone, and thinking that San Remo would now be the nearest place in which she could venture to hide her diminished head and reflect upon the spitefulness of perverse fate, fled upstairs to her room to take counsel of solitude.
But in this she was balked before reaching her sanctuary by the encounter of Mrs. Boundrish, round-eyed and in very unfinished toilet, hurrying along the corridor in the greatest perturbation.
"Oh dear, Mrs. Allonby!" she cried in agitated accellerando that admitted of no stops, "what shall I do? Dorris is in such a state. I can't make anything of her. She was never taken like this before and this dreadful spotted fever about nobody knows how it begins but of course their poor brains and foreign doctors and chiefly the young and they go off so soon and so infectious and Boundrish at Nice oh dear! She won't speak."
"But is she spotted?" Ermengarde asked solemnly.