“Well, you see,” she said with an air of great candor, after deliberately tearing out the paragraph, “it’s rather an involved matter.”
“I don’t see anything involved about it,” returned the lofty and determined Maud. “Who is this man?”
“Yes; who is he?” echoed Helen, coming mildly to her support.
From the corner of her eye the badgered girl could see the object of the inquiry. Still smiling! It was too much. Then and there Darcy committed that ignoble act known and reprehended in the higher sporting circles, wherein Andy Dunne moves, as “passing the buck.”
“You tell them, Monty,” she said sweetly.
Of a great statesman, now dead, it has been written:
Cheated by treachery and beguiled by Fate,
Once in his life we well may call him great.
Thus with Mr. Jacob Remsen alias Sir Montrose Veyze. Out of conscious nothing he had, in that precious moment’s respite, evoked an instantaneous and full-fledged plan to meet the crisis.
Fixing upon Maud as the more formidable antagonist, he impaled her on the beam of his monocle.
“Haw!” he ejaculated. “You’ve heard about the Veyze Succession, I assume.”