“Oh! sir! Oh! m’m,” she cried, breathless. “I’ve lost her. For the last hour I’ve been sitting in the waiting-room at the Bon Marché, as she bid me, and she’s never come back. And at last a little boy came and put this note in my hand for Mrs. West, and told me the young lady said I was to go along home to the hotel.”
“My own Gwenny, forgive me,” ran the note. “I couldn’t bear to meet him in a horrid, ordinary way. We are off on top a tram to take our luncheon at Versailles, and by five o’clock, I’ll be back and introduce him to you in proper fashion.”
“If it’s that scoundrel Moffat, he’ll never bring her back,” shouted John Mordaunt. “He well knows she has a fortune from her uncle coming to her on her marriage with no matter whom. He’ll get her off somewhere and manage to have a ceremony performed before he is interrupted. He—”
“I believe in Cecily,” said Gwendolyn, quietly. “Let us, you and I, Mr. Mordaunt, go directly in pursuit of them. Cecily is foolish, reckless, but she would never give you—and me—that pain.”
“Then it is you who have made her know herself! God bless you,” said the agitated man. “Ah! Gwendolyn, why did I not have you from the first?”
Miss Mimms afterward averred that you might have knocked her down with a feather when, that afternoon, the whole party of four came driving up to the door of the hotel. (Miss M. had spent most of her day suspended like a banner for royalty out of the windows of the first floor.) He, the young lady’s papa—looking like a general or a judge, she couldn’t exactly say which, but as fine a show of a man as she wished ever to see; Mrs. West, so happy and smiling, just like a little girl that has got a present she’d been crying for; and Miss Mordaunt—well, nobody could beat her for looks and pretty ways. At the very top of the steps didn’t she seize Mimms and hug her, and introduce her to “Mr. Angus McCrea, the young man that ran away with me this morning, and that’s going to be my husband”?
For Mr. Angus McCrea it was who had wooed Cecily’s roving heart into his safe-keeping—a fine, manly young fellow, to whom even John Mordaunt, the discourager of sons-in-law, could not take exception.