"Indeed I won't," he cried with a ring of victory. "I'd be a mucker and a sneak to do so, and you would never want to look at me again. Deny it,—and deny that you love me,—oh, Gwendolen, Gwendolen!"
With a little sob, in which a golden feather had been caught, she leaned to his arms.
He took up the little brown sealskin cap, flung it back to her head, and, in his most boyish, impudent, and ecstatic tone, said in her ear, "You know the penalty for wearing another fellow's hat?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In his favorite small smoking-room at the French Legation, crammed with motley Japanese and Gallic bric-a-brac, Count Ronsard fumbled nervously with his nether-lip.
"You sent for me, your Excellency?" said the secretary Mouquin, at the door.
"Allons! Entrez! It is the devil!—what our English cousins call 'the beastly bore.' But for his mother, the Princess Olga, I would wash my hands entirely!"
He went through the gesture, revolving one fat pudding of a fist about the other, and closing with an outward fling of both, and a shrug that made his body quake. "No news at all, Mouquin?"