“My daughter’s engaged to him. I’ve only just learned,” she faltered.
“Engaged? Sacrebleu! Ah, le goujat!”—for the second he was desperately, furiously, jealously in love with Betty Errington. “Ah, le sale type! Voyons! This engagement must be broken off. At once! You are her mother.”
“She will hear of nothing against him.”
“You will tell her this. It will be a blow; but——”
Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between helpless fingers. “Betty is infatuated. She won’t believe it.” She regarded him piteously. “Oh, Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has an independent fortune and is over twenty-one. I am powerless.”
“I will meet his two friends,” exclaimed Aristide magnificently—“and I will kill him. Voilà!”
“Oh, a duel? No! How awful!” cried the mild lady horror-stricken.
He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet of a newspaper, which he had caught up from a table. “I will run him through the body like that”—Aristide had never handled a foil in his life—“and when he is dead, your beautiful daughter will thank me for having saved her from such an execrable fellow.”
“But you mustn’t fight. It would be too dreadful. Is there no other way?”
“You must consult first with your daughter,” said Aristide.