“So do I whenever I see him,” said Mouse in her frankest and sweetest manner. “I have always stood by him, you know. He is so courtly and charming and now so old. It is horribly cruel, I think, to shut one’s doors on a man of that age. He may have been all they say—I suppose he has—but his sins must have been over before we were born, and when anybody is so old as that I, for one, really cannot be unkind.”
What an angel she was! thought the young grandnephew of Prince Khris; an angel of modern make, with wings of chiffon, which would not perhaps stand a shower of rain or a buffet of wind, but still an angel!
CHAPTER XLI.
“Lord! my dear Ronnie,” exclaimed Daddy Gwyllian, “what poor short-sighted creatures we are with all our worldly wisdom! To think that I ever advised you to do such a thing! Lord! I might have ruined you!”
His astonishment and repentance were so extreme and sincere that Hurstmanceaux was bewildered.
“What did you ever advise me to do,” he asked, “that would have ruined me?”
“I told you to marry her.”
“To marry whom?”
“Massarene’s daughter.”
Hurstmanceaux’s face changed. “I believe you did,” he said stiffly. “I am glad you see the impropriety of telling a poor man to marry a rich woman.”