"That was a small matter," she said eagerly. "Although my respected aunt-in-law has long since instructed her staff not to admit me to her presence, there remains in her employ a child of nature, an untutored Provençal housemaid, who in former days chose to idealize me, and even now would do anything reasonably atrocious at my bidding. She it was who contrived to let me in from the lane, to which a cab from the station brought me up the hill. I should tell you that I am stopping temporarily at Nice, in an hotel where they accept me without questions, but which has proved, alas, too fatally convenient to Monte Carlo!"
"Then, if you will allow me, I will myself see you into another cab for your return. There is a station for carriages at no great distance down the road from here. To-morrow I will present myself at your hotel in Nice, with the necessary papers insuring to you the allowance I named, and an agreement, which I shall in return ask you to sign, pledging yourself to keep your side of the bargain."
"American promptitude in business is proverbial," she said, essaying an easy laugh, and darting a side glance, not unmixed with admiration, upon her interlocutor. "How nice it must be to be disgustingly rich as all you Yankees are; to be able to confound the politics and frustrate the knavish tricks of your enemies by the prompt administration of hard cash! I always thought that if I'd had money enough to be good on, I might have graduated as a saint."
When Glynn walked up the steps at Reine des Fées, feeling a mixture of disgust and pride in his victory achieved, Posey ran out to meet him, slipping her arm in his.
"You've triumphed, I see. Oh! John, dear, what daddy needs is a real son like you, and I, just such a brother. Don't tell me anything about that horrid creature now, let's be happy for a while. Let us speak of something as far from her as one pole of earth is from the other—of dear Helen Carstairs, whose card I found on the hall table when I went in after leaving you. If it hadn't been that I was with you, I'd have begrudged missing her for anybody's sake. Of course the stupid servants said I was not at home. Now, why couldn't they have shown her into the garden, and then she could have been introduced to you, and how nice that would have been! The two people of all others I most admire, and shall expect and insist upon being friends with each other! Say, John, to please me that you are longing to meet Helen!"
"Posey," began Glynn, and his voice to his own ears sounded unnaturally thin, "I have been waiting a chance to tell you that I have known Miss Carstairs; that I ran upon her by chance at the Gare de Lyons yesterday, just as the train for the South had started. That we were, in fact, companions in the same compartment, and talked of you together, more than once, during our day's run."
"You! Helen! Wonders will never cease!" cried the girl exultingly. "But," a sobering thought seizing hold of her, "how was it possible you never mentioned her to me in a single one of your letters?"
"Try to think why, Posey," the young man said gravely, as they paused together in the hall filled with dead marbles and living blossoms of the Spring.
"It was Helen, then, Helen?" Her eyes flamed the rest of the sentence.
"Yes."