“You don’t seem to need any introduction to my niece, Lord Battleford,” he said, loftily, while his face flushed with turkey-cock rage, “and I beg to inform you that I think it a deuced ungentlemanlike thing on your part to compromise a girl with clandestine meetings and flirtations in the absence of her family, and I tell you plainly the whole thing has got to stop.”
“Not so fast, if you please, Mr. Hay,” said my sailor, laughing. “I have won a wife who likes me for what I am irrespective of what I have, and I hope you and Mrs. Russell are not going to spoil our romance by refusing your consent. Speak up, Kate,” he said, turning to me; “tell these discreet people that I am something better than a title—a man you have learned to love.”
And so I had to make a second confession of the state of my heart, and mamma succumbed in two minutes to Battleford’s charms—or those of his title—but I heard Uncle Barton still scolding as he helped her up the sand dune.
“Oh, yes, he’ll make a she-earl of Kate—countess, I mean—but he’ll take her away from us, and I fancy you will yet regret the day you trusted her out of your sight, when the ocean lies between us and our little girl.”
But she didn’t! For in giving me to Battleford she not only had me often with her, but gained the dearest of sons.
Mrs. Evremond
By Mrs. John Van Vorst
& Marie Van Vorst
