"When I want your counsel, Emile, I will ask it," said Vaughan, shortly; "but, as I have no intention of going in for the prize, there is no need for you to bet on the chance of the throw."
"Comme tu veux!" said the Parisian, shrugging his shoulders. "That homme de paille, your priestly cousin, will take her back to the English fogs, and make her a much better husband than you'd ever be, mon garçon."
Vaughan moved restlessly.
"The idiot! if I thought so—— The devil take you, Emile! why do you talk of such things?"
At that minute Nina was sitting by one of the windows of their hotel, watching for Ernest, with a bouquet he had sent her on a table by her side; and the Rev. Eusebius was talking in a very low tone to her father. She caught a few words. "Last night—Vaughan at the Frères Provençaux—a souper au cabinet—Mademoiselle Céline, première danseuse—quite terrible," &c., &c.
Nina flushed scarlet, and turned round. "If you blame your cousin, Mr. Ruskinstone, why were you there yourself?"
The Warden colored too. With him, as with a good many, foreign air relaxed the severity of the Decalogue, and what was sin at home, where everybody knew it, was none at all abroad—under the rose. Some dear pharisees will not endanger their souls by a carpet-dance in England, but if a little bird followed them in their holiday across the Channel, it might chance to see them disporting under a domino noir.
"I had been," he stammered, "to see, as you know, a beautiful specimen of the arcboutant in a ruined chapel of the Carmélites, some miles down the Seine. It was very late, and I was very tired, so turned into the Frères Provençaux to take some little refreshment, and I there saw my unhappy cousin in society which ought, Miss Gordon, to disqualify him for yours. It is very painful to me to mention such things to you. I never thought you overheard——"
"Then, if it is very painful to you," Nina burst in, impetuously, her bouche de rose, as De Kerroualle called it, curving haughtily, "why are you ceaselessly raking up every possible bit of scandal that you can against your cousin? His life does not clash with yours, his acts do not matter to you, his extravagance does not rob you. I used to fancy charity should cover a multitude of sins, but it seems to me that, now-a-days, clergymen, like Dr. Watt's naughty dogs, only delight to bark and bite."
"You are cruelly unjust," answered the Warden, in those smooth tones that irritate one much more than "hard swearing." "I have no other wish than Christian kindness to poor Ernest. If, in my place as pastor, I justly condemn his errors and vices, it is only through a loving desire to wean him from his downward course."