CHAPTER XXXVII
"Dear, dear! Now, only do tell!" exclaims Mrs. Bradshaw Woollffe, in the solemn conclave of a feminine gathering at the commencement of the London season. "You ought to know, Mrs. Douglas. Is your daughter really going to marry Keith Athelstone after all?"
"After all!" echoes Mrs. Douglas. "All what!"
"Well, I guess you know pretty well what people said two seasons ago. But to think things should turn out like this—quite a romance! Only to think of it!"
"It is not so unnatural," says Mrs. Douglas loftily. "Mr. Athelstone was always deeply attached to my daughter, and, in fact, came home from America with the intention of proposing. But he was just too late. My dear girl had accepted Sir Francis Vavasour."
"Is that so? Well, I've heard another shaped tale about that. Anyhow, it seems Sir Francis was a brute to her, and she—well, any one who knows Lauraine, knows she's got real downright good stuff in her; and as for Vavasour—isn't there one of your national poets says: 'Nothing in his life became him like his leaving it'? That's just about his sort for an epitaph, I should say. No offence, I hope, Mrs. Douglas, though he was your son-in-law. You know I always speak my mind right plump out. There's no nonsense about me."
"I am not in the least offended," says Mrs. Douglas sweetly. "All men have faults, and Sir Francis Vavasour was certainly not as devoted a husband as my dear child had reason to expect. But you see she is rather cold and prudish, and all that, and he—well, he had been spoilt by society. We must excuse him for being a little wild, and really they got on very well together, and nothing could exceed his kindness and generosity to Lauraine. And he has left her everything."
"And she's going to marry Keith Athelstone?"
"Well, her husband has been dead for nearly a year, and dear Keith is so very delicate since that accident, and he has been ordered to winter at Algiers, and nothing will induce him to go unless Lauraine goes also."
"That was a queer thing too," says Mrs. Bradshaw B. Woollffe eagerly. "Never could make head or tail of it. Lady Jean was kind of mixed up in that duel, wasn't she?"