The lovely and high-born relict of a decrepit and enormously wealthy commoner, she had sustained her husband’s loss with a becoming display of sorrow, and passed with exquisite grace and discretion through the successive phases of the toilet indicative of connubial woe. From a lovely chrysalis swathed in crape she had changed to a dove-colored moth; the moth had become a heliotrope butterfly, on the point of changing its wings for a brighter pair, when the post brought her a letter from one of her dearest friends. It bore the Zurich postmark, and ran as follows:
“Hotel Schwert,
“Appenbad,
“June 18th.”
“I wonder, dear, whether you would mind being troubled with Val for a day? He is coming up from Seaton next Thursday on dentist’s leave, and one does not care that a boy of sixteen—one can consider Val a boy without stretching the imagination overmuch—should be drifting anchorless in town. You will find him grown and developed.... You see, I take it for granted, in my own rude way, that you have already said ‘Yes’ to my request.... The views here are divine—such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the Rhine Valley! To quote poor Dynham, who suffered much from the whey-cure, ‘every prospect pleases, and only man is bile.’ Kiss Val for me. My dear, the thought of his future is a continual anxiety. The title to keep up, and an income of barely eight thousand pounds.... ‘Marry him,’ you will say; but to whom? American heiresses are beginning to have an exorbitant idea of their own value, and then Val’s is an open, simple nature—unworldly to a degree! Not that I, his mother, could wish him otherwise, but—you will understand and sympathize, I know! And boys are so easily molded by a woman who has charm! If you could drop a word here and there, calculated to bring him to a sense of the responsibility that rests upon his young shoulders, the duty of restoring the diminished fortunes of his house by a really sensible marriage.... I have dinned and dinned, but I fear without much result.
“Ever yours,
“G. D. E. V. T.
“Please address Val, ‘Care of Rev. H. Buntham, Seaton College, near Grindsor.’—G.
“Buntham is the house-master. V. says he ‘understands the fellows thoroughly.’ Such a tribute, I think, to a tutor from a boy.—G.”
So a dainty monogrammed and coroneted note, on heliotrope paper, with a thin but decided bordering of black, was sent off to the Marquis of Valcourt, and Valcourt’s hostess in prospective consulted a male relative over the luncheon-table as to the most approved methods of entertaining a schoolboy.