Marion greeted him cordially.
“For it is just possible,” thought she, “that through him I may hear something, however little, of him who is never really absent from my thoughts.”
But it was not so. The little Frenchman had left Altes soon after Mrs. Archer’s departure, and since then had been wandering to and fro, now at last finding himself at the summit or his desires, a visitor in “le pays charmant d’Angleterre.”
His account of his travels was very amusing, only he was so dreadfully polite about everything.
London he had found “manifique, tout ce qu’il y a de plus beau,” but “triste, vairee triste, surtout le Dimanche.” “Laysteer Squarr,” had not, he confessed, quite come up to his ideal of the much vaunted comfort Anglais, and the cab fares had struck him as slightly exorbitant, not being accustomed in France to pay something extra to the driver over and above the five itself, as he found was always expected by London cabbies.
“But my dear Monsieur,” broke in Harry at this point, “you must have been regularly done. I declare it’s a national disgrace to treat strangers so!”
M. de l’Orme looked puzzled.
“Pardon,” he exclaimed, “I do not quite at all onderstand. Monsieur say, I have been ‘donne.’ Donne? I request tousand forgives. That I am then beast! Mais ‘donne.’ C’est bien ‘fini,’ ‘achevé,’ que Monsieur veut dire?”
“Oh, no,” said Harry bluntly, “not that at all. Done means cheated, taken in. You understand now? I meant that the cabbies had been cheating you, in other words ‘doing you,’ and uncommonly brown too,” he added in a lower voice.
“Harry!” said Marion in a tone of remonstrance.