“They have a way in those New Orleans families of keeping all the money in the family connection. I judge that it would be a good financial arrangement for Madame Isabey’s daughter to marry her stepson, and the suggestion will come quite naturally from the old lady and will probably be accepted.”
Lyddon advanced these airy hypotheses with such an air of certainty that Angela took them just as he intended, seriously and definitely. He had trained this flower for Neville Tremaine, and he did not wish Isabey to inhale all its fragrance.
A little before eight o’clock Adrienne came down into the hall where the lamps and candles were lighted. She was exquisitely dressed in a gown of the thinnest white muslin and lace, which set off her delicate, dark beauty. She had already made a conquest of Colonel Tremaine by her graceful affability, and riveted the chains upon him by her soft manners and her well-expressed gratitude. Women without penetration seldom took any notice of Lyddon, but Adrienne had much natural discernment, and she recognized under Lyddon’s ill-fitting clothes and general air of abstracted scholarship a very considerable man. As she talked, standing in an attitude of perfect grace with one bare and rounded arm upon the mantelpiece, Lyddon concluded that he would add a second to his private portrait gallery of women, Angela having been the only one up to that time. Adrienne Le Noir was neither a green girl nor a simpleton nor a would-be wit, nor any of the tiresome things which Lyddon always took for granted with young and pretty women. She made no pretentions to be well read, but she had studied the book of life and had mastered many of its pages, and Lyddon suspected that she was better acquainted with the human document than most women. He found himself wondering what sort of a marriage hers had been, and surmised that she was by no means broken-hearted. Her pensive air struck him as being rather an expectant than a retrospective melancholy.
When supper was announced Madame Isabey had not yet appeared, and Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine would have died rather than gone in the dining room without her.
“I am afraid you will not find my mother very punctual,” said Adrienne with a smile. “Even Captain Isabey has never been able to make her punctual, and she will do more for him than for anyone else in the world. I often tell her that he is her favorite child, not I.”
“It is most delightful,” said Colonel Tremaine grandly, “to see so affectionate a relation existing between a stepmother and a stepson. No doubt Captain Isabey, with whom we all became infatuated, regards Madame Isabey as a mother.”
Adrienne laughed a little. “I scarcely think that,” she said. “My mother never saw Captain Isabey until he was more than twenty years old, but he is very chivalrous, as you know, and was always most attentive to my mother, and she has a kind heart. She admires Captain Isabey, and is very proud of him.”
“As she may well be,” responded Colonel Tremaine impressively. “And to you, my dear madame, such a brother must have been an acquisition indeed.”
“But he is not my brother,” replied Adrienne, quickly and decisively. “I never saw Captain Isabey until just before my marriage, and although we are the best of friends and I haven’t words to express his goodness to me, I don’t look upon him as a relative.”
Lyddon glanced at Angela as much as to say: “Just as I thought.”