"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"
She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from Samson et Dalila on the terrace of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.
"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879—tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos—but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't have accepted it. And, naturally enough—I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."
Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:
"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"
Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.
"It would matter—lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900, when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked out of the Army—in War-time, mind you!—for not backing up his C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's respectable, and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him—and as for his grandfather—the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and dance, I should say.... So, you see, I can't—sympathise with you as you want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like a brick.... As for what you've told me—about your mother——" In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in families, like rheumatism"—he was getting idiotic—"or Roman noses! Be plucky—and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street—man my sister Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day! ..."
Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....
CHAPTER IV
RAYMOND OF THE S. AË. F.