The retort was obvious; but apparently it was not anticipated. Mrs. Fontaine flushed scarlet at the sneer. She looked at him hard-eyed, and said, with set teeth:
“I wish to God I were.”
CHAPTER XIV
Something was wrong with Tommy Burgrave. Instead of flinging excited hands in the direction of splendid equipage or beautiful woman, he sat glum by Clementina’s side, while the most dazzling procession in Europe passed before his eyes. Of course it was a little cockneyfied to sit on a public bench on the edge of the great Avenue of the Champs Elysées; but Clementina knew that consciousness of cockneydom would not disturb the serenity of Tommy’s soul. Something else was the matter. He was ill at ease. Gloom darkened his brow and care perched on his shoulders.
The car of thirty-five million dove-power which had brought the wanderers, the day before, to Paris, had deposited Etta Concannon at the house of some friends for a few hours’ visit, and Tommy and Clementina at Ledoyen’s, where they had lunched. It was over the truite à la gelée that Tommy’s conversation had begun to flag. His melancholy deepened as the meal proceeded. When they strolled, after lunch; across to the Avenue, his face assumed an expression of acute misery. He sat forward, elbows on knees, and traced sad diagrams on the gravel with the point of his cane.
“My good Tommy,” said Clementina, at last—what on earth was the matter with the boy?—“you look as merry as a museum.”
He groaned. “I’m in a devil of a fix, Clementina.”
“Indeed?”
What could he be in a fix about? Anything more aggravatingly, insolently, excruciatingly happy than the pair of young idiots whom she had accompanied in the thirty-five million dove-power car aforesaid, she had never beheld in her life. Sometimes it was as much as she could do to restrain herself from stopping the car and dumping the pair of them down by the wayside and telling them to go and play Daphnis and Chloe by themselves in the sylvan solitudes of France, instead of conducting their antic gambols over her heartstrings. The air re-echoed deafeningly with cooings, and the sky grew sickly with smiles. What could a young man in love want more?
“It’s the biggest, awfullest mess that ever a fellow got into,” said Tommy.