“Indeed you won’t, for Nina won’t see me for some time after to-morrow, and has exacted a promise from me that I would go with her to choose her very latest wedding-present to me. So you will have to spare me for an hour or two.”
“And indeed I won’t! Just picture your being selfish enough to want to go off without me! You shall do your shopping. But you must do it in my company, for, oddly enough, I also have a fancy that you should choose your most prized wedding-present from me yourself, and we can make one expedition of it. Oh, here is our gracious princess herself! She will agree to all I propose, I know.”
“I must first know what it is that you propose,” smiled the Princess Nina, who had just entered the room, Prince Michaelow following closely in her wake. “I don’t like to make promises in the dark.”
“Sergius wants to go shopping with us,” I explained.
“Oh, as for that, I mean to go, too,” said the prince. “If Sergius will look just a shade less bridegroomy he may also make one of the party.”
The prince’s sally at Sergius’s ecstatically happy look was received with a laugh by us all, and half an hour later we were all four being driven toward Piccadilly behind a pair of splendid bays. Then ensued a series of excursions into various West End establishments that was even more odd than it was delightful, which is saying much. For it was strange to me to feel myself the courted and petted object of attention on the part of three such splendid specimens of humanity as my betrothed and the Prince and Princess Michaelow. Probably others also noted the disparity in our appearance and commented on it after their own fashion.
But my companions were too agreeably employed to pay attention to much beyond the business at hand, and so many presents were lavished upon me that I found it necessary to enter a protest. We were all just leaving a Regent Street jeweler’s shop, preparatory to re-entering the carriage for our homeward drive, when Princess Nina suddenly said to me in a low voice: “What a beautiful woman! And she seems to know you. Who is she?”
I looked up hastily, and was confronted by my sister and her intended husband. For an instant I hesitated whether to return Belle’s stare of haughty recognition by a conciliatory movement or not. My hesitation proved my salvation from what would have been an intolerable humiliation. The Earl of Greatlands and Miss Courtney passed on without vouchsafing me anything but the disapproving look due to an obnoxious stranger rather than to a sister, and we had entered our carriage before I had had time to answer Nina’s question.
I felt the blood leave my face at thus meeting my mother’s child as a stranger, and Nina was quick to see that I was strangely moved by the encounter. She looked the question she did not care to trouble me by repeating, and I tried to answer her in as unmoved a voice as possible.
“That was my sister who passed us. And the gentleman who is with her is the Earl of Greatlands.”