Molly half jumped up in bed, and then sitting down again, pulled up the counterpane.
"I can't get out," she said, "this nightdress isn't respectable. Just go to the dressing-table, Tony—there's a dear—and open that top drawer on the right. You'll find a jewel-case inside—a brown one."
Tony did as he was commanded, and took out a small Russia leather box, with Molly's initials in gold stamped upon the lid.
"Here you are," she said, holding out her hand. "Now give me that little bunch of keys by the brush."
She opened the box, and rummaging inside extracted a slip of paper, which she unfolded and glanced through before handing it to Tony.
"How about that?" she inquired with a sort of dispassionate triumph.
Tony took the document, and sitting down again on the foot of the bed, spread it out in front of him. It was the ordinary registrar's form of marriage certificate, dated at Chelmsford six months previously, and it set out in the restrained but convincing style adopted by such authors, that on the date in question Mary Monk, daughter of John Monk, game-keeper, and Pedro da Talles, son of Pedro da Talles, gentleman, had seen fit to enter into the bonds of Holy Matrimony.
Tony read it through with an interest that he seldom devoted to current literature, and then looked up with an expression of deep admiration.
"You're a wonderful person, Molly," he said.
She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, I'm not under any mistaken ideas about its value," she replied coolly. "I know it wouldn't cut any ice in Livadia—and I expect it's about equally useless here. You see in the first place Pedro isn't allowed to marry any one except a Royalty, and then of course this paper's all out of order. You see we had to keep it dark who Peter really was, or of course the news would have been all over the shop. Fortunately no ordinary person in England knows his family name, so there wasn't much chance of anybody spotting the entry. The only thing was we couldn't describe his father as a king—that would have busted the show hopelessly—so we had to put him down as a gentleman. I expect that's enough to make it illegal by itself."