Kitty gave him a slight smile, then said, with a furrowed brow:
"Who could ever have thought we should find maman here!"
"Don't have her on your mind!" said Ashe, with some sharpness. "I can't have anything worrying you."
She slipped her hand into his.
"Is that man going to marry her—at last? She called him 'Markham.' That's new."
"Looks rather like it," said Ashe. "Then he'll have to look after the debts!"
They began to piece together what they knew of Colonel Warington and his relation to Madame d'Estrées. It was not much. But Ashe believed that originally Warington had not been in love with her at all. There had been a love-affair between her and Warington's younger brother, a smart artillery officer, when she was the widowed Lady Blackwater. She had behaved with more heart and scruple than she had generally been known to do in these matters, and the young officer adored her—hoped, indeed, to marry her. But he was called on—in Paris—to fight a duel on her account, and was killed. Before fighting, he had commended Lady Blackwater to the care of his much older brother, also a soldier, between whom and himself there existed a rare and passionate devotion; and ever since the poor lad's death, Markham Warington had been the friend and quasi-guardian of the lady—through her second marriage, through the checkered years of her existence in London, and now through the later years of her residence on the Continent, a residence forced upon her by her agreement with the Tranmores. Again and again he had saved her from bankruptcy, or from some worse scandal which would have wrecked the last remnants of her fame.
But, all the time, he was himself bound by strong ties of gratitude and affection to an elder sister who had brought him up, with whom he lived in Scotland during half the year. And this stout Puritan lady detested the very name of Madame d'Estrées.
"But she's dead," said Ashe. "I remember noticing her death in the Times some three months ago. That, of course, explains it. Now he's free to marry."
"And so maman will settle down, and be happy ever afterwards!" said Kitty, with a sarcastic lifting of the brow. "Why should anybody be good?"