So I was delighted to hear of her plucky resolve, particularly as it at once got rid of the difficulty of Miss Rybot’s chaperon—since Brentin had made up his mind not to take his wife, but send her down to Rochester while he was away, and keep her fully employed there, in Charles Dickens’s country.
I kissed my sister, promising to come back to dinner, and meantime went up in the nursery, where I found my niece Mollie seated by the fire, wrapped in a grimy little shawl, reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
CHAPTER X
MR. BRENTIN’S INDISCRETION—LUCY AND I MAKE IT UP—BAILEY THOMPSON APPEARS IN CHURCH—ON CHRISTMAS DAY WE HOLD A COUNCIL OF WAR
Now it was the very day we went down to “The French Horn” together that Mr. Brentin confessed to me how, in spite of our agreement as to keeping the affair a profound secret, he had actually been so rash as to confide our whole plan to a stranger—a stranger casually encountered, above all places, in the smoking-room of the “Victoria”!
How incomprehensible, how weak and wavering is man! Here was Julius C. Brentin, as shrewd an American as can be met with in Low’s Exchange, deliberately pouring into a strange ear a secret he had hitherto rigidly guarded even from his young and attractive wife.
Of course he had his excuses and defence; what man has not, when he does wrong? But whatever the excuse, there still remained the unpleasant fact that there was positively a man walking about (and from his description one evidently not quite a gentleman) who knew all about our arrangements and could at any moment communicate them to the authorities at Monte Carlo.
When I asked him, somewhat sharply, how ever he had come to commit so gross a blunder, he had really no explanation to give. He seemed to think he had sufficiently safeguarded himself by exchanging cards with the man, than which I could not conceive anything more childish—
MR. BAILEY THOMPSON
without an address or a club on it! What possible guarantee was there in that? Brentin himself couldn’t quite say; only he seemed to fancy the possession of his card gave him some sort of hold on the owner, and that so long as he had it in his keeping we were safe against treachery.