'My lady,' said I, with a bow, 'it is but yours to command, mine to obey. What were the contents of that letter?'
'Read it,' she replied, taking the folded sheet from her pocket, and handing it to me.
She had been quite right in characterising the note as an extraordinary epistle. The Honourable John Haddon had the temerity to propose that she should go through a form of marriage with him in the old church we had just left. If she did that, he said, it would console him for the mad love he felt for her. The ceremony would have no binding force upon her whatever, and she might bring whom she pleased to perform it. If she knew no one that she could trust, he would invite an old college chum, and bring him to the church next morning at half-past seven o'clock. Even if an ordained clergyman performed the ceremony, it would not be legal unless it took place between the hours of eight in the morning, and three in the afternoon. If she consented to this, the emeralds were hers once more.
'This is the proposal of a madman,' said I, as I handed back the letter.
'Well,' she replied, with a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders, 'he has always said he was madly in love with me, and I quite believe it. Poor young man, if this mummery were to console him for the rest of his life, why should I not indulge him in it?'
'Lady Alicia, surely you would not countenance the profaning of that lovely old edifice with a mock ceremonial? No man in his senses could suggest such a thing!'
Once more her eyes were twinkling with merriment.
'But the Honourable John Haddon, as I have told you, is not in his senses.'
'Then why should you indulge him?'
'Why? How can you ask such a question? Because of the emeralds. It is only a mad lark, after all, and no one need know of it. Oh, Monsieur Valmont,' she cried pleadingly, clasping her hands, and yet it seemed to me with an undercurrent of laughter in her beseeching tones, 'will you not enact for us the part of clergyman? I am sure if your face were as serious as it is at this moment, the robes of a priest would become you.'