"Then hurry," said Lady Hesketh. "Thorald, call the others."
"I," said Cecil, "am going to drive Betty in the dog-cart."
"She'll probably take the reins," said Sir Thorald, cynically.
Cecil brandished his whip and looked determined; but it was Betty who drove him to Saint-Lys station, after all.
The adieux were said, even more tearfully this time. Jack kissed his sister tenderly, and she wept a little on his shoulder—thinking of Rickerl.
One by one the vehicles rolled away down the gravel drive; and last of all came Molly Hesketh in the coupé with Jack Marche.
Molly was sad and a trifle distraite. Those periodical mental illuminations during which she discovered for the thousandth and odd time that she loved her husband usually left her fairly innocuous. But she was a born flirt; the virus was bred in the bone, and after the first half-mile she opened her batteries—her eyes—as a matter of course on Jack.
What she got for her pains was a little sermon ending, "See here, Molly—three years ago you played the devil with me until I kissed you, and then you were furious and threatened to tell Sir Thorald. The truth is, you're in love with him, and there is no more harm in you than there is in a china kitten."
"Jack!" she gasped.
"And," he resumed, "you live in Paris, and you see lots of things and you hear lots of things that you don't hear and see in Lincolnshire. But you're British, Molly, and you are domestic, although you hate the idea, and there will never be a desolated hearth in the Hesketh household as long as you speak your mother-tongue and read Anthony Trollope."