“May I stop a moment?” he said, and sat down.
“I have a letter for you,” said Marie Louise.
His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and he slipped a letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and from it he took the letter she cautiously disclosed. He chatted awhile and moved away.
This sort of meeting took place several times in several places. When the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered about, Nicky would murmur to Marie Louise that she had better start home. He would take her arm familiarly and the transfer of the parcel would be deftly achieved.
This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir Joseph apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He 28 seemed to be sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes in their fat, watery bags peered at her with a tender regret and an ulterior regret as well.
He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was such an important business and he had no one else to trust. And Marie Louise, for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his confidence, regarded it as sacred, and would not violate it so much as to make the least effort to learn what messages she was carrying. Nothing, of course, would have been easier than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes the lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked into a bathroom.
Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great country seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American who had bought it from nobility gone back to humility. Here life was life. There were forests and surreptitious pheasants, deer that would almost but never quite come to call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and transept like cherubim all wings and voice.
The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful not to intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them. The life was like life at a big hotel. There was always a little gambling to be had, tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet chat, gardens to stroll and sniff or grub in, horses to ride, motors at beck and call, solitude or company.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great friendship with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Washington, D. C., so grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.
Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea. Polly came down, too, and had “the time of her young life” in doing a bit of the women’s war work that became the beautiful fashion of the time. The justification of it was that it released men for the trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.