“Yes; I’ve spoken to the Pater; he’ll let you have ’em.”
“Tôpe là donc!” she said frankly, and she held out her pretty gloved right hand. Cocky respectfully kissed the tips of her fingers. Then he grinned.
“Let’s go and ask the Pater’s blessing! He’s over there with the Princess.”
“The devil take her if she hasn’t got some card up her sleeve that she don’t show me,” he thought as he continued to walk on beside her. “But she’s awfully fetching, and she’ll be great fun, and the Pater will think I’m reforming, and he’ll come down with the blunt, and what a wax Beric’ll be in!”
Beric was his next brother, Alberic Orme.
Meantime the lovely and youthful creature, who brushed the grass with her bronze kid boots beside him, pursued similar reflections.
“He don’t look as if he’d live a year; and he’s too far gone to bother me much, and such a crétin as that Harry won’t mind, and the vulture’s egg is worth a little worry.”
Her relatives, and especially her eldest brother, were horrified by her decision; but their persuasions and their entreaties were as ineffectual as their condemnation.
“He will let me do as I like, and I shall have the vulture’s egg,” she invariably answered. The vulture’s egg was a great diamond, so called, which, while it had been in the possession of each succeeding Duchess of Otterbourne, had rendered her the envied of all her sex. One of the family, present at the battle of Plassy, as a volunteer, had taken it from the turban of a native prince whom he had slain. It was a yellow diamond of great size and effulgence; and if she married Cocky she could, she hoped, wear it at once, as his mother had been dead many years.
“You marry that little wretch for the sake of that looted jewel!” said her brother Hurstmanceaux, furious.