Goodwood laughed again.
"If you poach on my manor here, I shall kill you Phil; so gare à vous!"
"You are in an enigmatical mood to-day! I can't say I see much wit in your riddles," said Carruthers, with his grandest and most contemptuous air, as he lit his Havana.
"Confound that fellow! I'd rather have had any other man in London for a rival! Twenty and more years ago how he cut me out with that handsome Virginie Peauderose, that we were both such mad boys after in Paris. However, it will be odd if I can't win the day here. A Goodwood rejected—pooh! There isn't a woman in England that would do it!" thought Goodwood, as he drove down the Fulham Road.
"'His manor!' Who's told him it's his? And if it be, what is that to me?" thought Carruthers, as he got into his tilbury. "Philip, you're not a fool, like the rest of them, I hope? You've not forsworn yourself surely? Pshaw!—nonsense!—impossible!"
"Certainly she has something very charming about her. If I were a man I don't think I could resist her," thought Lady Marabout, as she sat in her box in the grand tier, tenth from the Queen's, moving her fan slowly, lifting her lorgnon now and then, listening vaguely to the music of the second act of the "Barbiere," for probably about the two hundredth time in her life, and looking at Flora Moutolieu, sitting opposite to her.
"The women are eternally asking me who she is, I don't care a hang who, but she's the prettiest thing in London," said Fulke Nugent, which was the warmest praise that any living man about town remembered to have heard fall from his lips, which limited themselves religiously to one legitimate laudation, which is a superlative nowadays, though Mr. Lindley Murray, if alive, wouldn't, perhaps, receive or recognize it as such: "Not bad-looking."
"It isn't who a woman is, it's what she is, that's the question, I take it," said Goodwood, as he left the Guards' box to visit the Marabout.
"By George!" laughed Nugent to Carruthers, "Goodey must be serious, eh, Phil? He don't care a button for little Bibi; he don't care even for Zerlina. When the ballet begins, I verily believe he's thinking less of the women before him than of the woman who has left the house; and if a fellow can give more ominous signs of being 'serious,' as the women phrase it, I don't know 'em, do you?"
"I don't know much about that sort of thing at all!" muttered Carruthers, as he went out to follow Goodwood to the Marabout box.