“See Paris last,” was the advice given them by a Parisian gentleman, whose acquaintance they had made; and when Mrs Girdwood, who smattered a little French, asked, Pourquoi? she was told that by seeing it first she would care for nothing beyond.
She had taken the Frenchman’s hint, and was now completing the programme.
Though she had met German barons and Italian counts by the score, her girls were still unengaged. Nothing suitable had offered itself in the shape of a title. It remained to be seen what Paris would produce.
The gentlemen “due in half an hour” were old acquaintances; two of them her countrymen, who, making the same tour, had turned up repeatedly on the route, sometimes travelling in her company. They were Messrs Lucas and Spiller.
She thought nothing of these. But there was a third expected, and looked for with more interest; one who had only called upon them the day before, and whom they had not seen since the occasion of his having dined with them in their Fifth Avenue house in New York.
It was the lost lord.
On his visit of yesterday everything had been explained; how he had been detained in the States on diplomatic business; how he had arrived in London after their departure for the Continent, with apologies for not writing to them—ignorant of their whereabouts.
On Mr Swinton’s part this last was a lie, as well as the first. In the chronicles of the time he had full knowledge of where they might have been found. He had studiously consulted the American newspaper published in London, which registered the arrivals and departures of transatlantic tourists, and knew to an hour when Mrs Girdwood and her girls left Cologne, crossed the Alps, stood upon the Bridge of Sighs, or climbed to the burning crater of Vesuvius.
And he had sighed and burned to be along with them, but could not. There was something needed for the accomplishment of his wishes—cash.
It was only when he saw recorded the Girdwood arrival in Paris, that he was at length enabled to scrape together sufficient for the expenses of a passage to, and short sojourn in, the French capital; and this only after a propitious adventure in which he had been assisted by the smiles of the goddess Fortune, and the beauty of his beloved Fan. Fan had been left behind in the London lodging. And by her own consent. She was satisfied to stay, even with the slender stipend her husband could afford to leave for her maintenance. In London the pretty horse-breaker would be at home.