Sauntering down to the hotel, Cyril came upon Louis and his father in the hall, waiting impatiently for Madame O’Malachy, who was going with them to hear the speeches in the market-place. Going up-stairs, he found Nadia in the sitting-room, arranging the flowers for the table, carefully and conscientiously, as she did everything, adding a spray here, and taking one away there, and holding up the vase to see the effect, then lifting everything out and beginning again.
Before her stood a glass in which her mother had placed carelessly two or three blossoms and a spray or two of feathery fern, which seemed to have arranged themselves, but of which the effect was perfect. By the table stood Madame O’Malachy, buttoning her long gloves and criticising freely her daughter’s work.
“You have no taste, Nadia. Surely it must be evident, even to you, that a brick is not the best model for a bouquet? Don’t pull the flowers about so much; you will ruin them, and I cannot afford any more to-day.”
“I am commissioned to say that the hothouses at the palace are at your disposal, madame, if you would honour my brother by allowing him to send you some flowers,” said Cyril, coming forward.
“His Majesty’s conduct is angelic,” returned Madame O’Malachy. “But of what use are all the flowers in Thracia if the artist’s eye for their arrangement is wanting?” She had taken the vase from Nadia and removed half its contents, then, with a twirl here and a poke there, she transformed the remainder into a thing of beauty. “I regret to perceive that the artistic instinct, the soul of poetry, is wanting in my daughter. She is very thorough, extremely conscientious, but what one may call—not heavy, that would be unkind—shall we say solid? I am perpetually worrying myself to discover why she bears no resemblance at all to me. ‘A reversion to an earlier type,’ I suppose the scientific gentlemen would call it; I say that she is one of the trials of my life. For me, I am not at all conscientious, I do nothing thoroughly; but I think I am not heavy?” She paused with her eyebrows uplifted in interrogation; and Cyril, though he had been reflecting what wretchedly bad form it was for a woman to try to make her daughter feel small in this way, had presence of mind enough to answer that such a word could never be mentioned in the same breath with the name of Madame O’Malachy.
“But I must hurry away,” the lady went on, “or O’Malachy will come up to look for me. I shall hear your news when I return, Milord Cyril.”
CHAPTER VIII.
FOR HIS GOOD.
“I think I have one piece of news that at any rate you will like to hear,” said Cyril, as Madame O’Malachy rustled out of the room and down the corridor towards the lift.
Nadia’s grey eyes glanced towards him. “You did not come here to offer us hothouse flowers,” she remarked. “There is something else that you have to say.”
“Won’t you believe that I came to enjoy the delightful conversation of Madame and yourself?” asked Cyril, lazily, for he was in a particularly comfortable chair, and found the spectacle of Nadia’s laborious dealing with the flowers very entertaining.