“No, I’m an abomination, I confess it,” answered the culprit, meekly.
“You must be feeling very tired.”
“I’m feeling more like boned goose than anything else, especially in the legs. By-the-way, I wonder if Farquhar will leave his to look for the strayed lamb?”
“Let him; it won’t do him any harm.”
Lucian’s eyes opened wide; Farquhar had described the ladies of Monkswell in picture-making phrases, and he was trying to fit this vivid young beauty into some one of the frames provided, which all seemed too strait. “Am I speaking to Miss Maude?” he asked at a venture, choosing the likeliest.
“Oh no. I am Mirabelle Fane, and this is my brother Bernard.”
“The dickens you are!” said Lucian to himself; for Farquhar, in relating the adventure of Mr. Fane and the copper, had not mentioned Miss Fane. Her foreign name and intonation caught Lucian’s ear, and he asked if she were French.
“My mother was Comtesse de Beaufort,” Dolly told him, and her naïve pride was quaint and pretty. Lucian mentioned Paris, and she fastened upon him with a string of eager questions, but put him to silence before half were answered, by declaring that he had talked too much.
“I’ve been off the silent list this fortnight past,” Lucian pleaded.
“But you are already overtired. You ought to lie down directly you get in, and take a dose of cod-liver oil.”