"My darling will be true to me, come what may," he thought. "No amount of persuasion or threats can induce her to give me up, and in the end, when Stephen Foster is convinced of that, he will make the best of it and withdraw his objections. If Madge has been sent out of town, she went against her will. But, of course, she will manage to let me hear from her."
Jack sat down to his desk, intending to write a letter to a friend in Paris, a well-to-do artist who lived in the neighborhood of the Pare Monceaux. He held his pen undecidedly for a moment, and then leaned back in his chair with a puzzled countenance.
"By Jove, it's queer," he muttered; "but Stephen Foster's voice was awfully familiar. We never met before, and I never laid eyes on the man, so far as I can remember. I am mistaken. It is only a fancy. No—I have it! He suggests M. Felix Marchand—there is something in common in their speech, though it is very slight. What an odd coincidence!"
That it could possibly be more than a coincidence did not occur to Jack, and he would have laughed the idea to scorn. He dismissed the matter from his mind, wrote and posted the letter, and then went off to dine by appointment with Victor Nevill.
There was no word from Madge the next day, and it is to be feared that Jack's work suffered in consequence, and that Alphonse found him slightly irritable. But on the following morning a letter came in the well-known handwriting. It was very brief. The girl was not out of town, but was stopping near Regent's Park with an elderly maternal aunt who lived in Portland Terrace, and was addicted to the companionship of cockatoos and cats, not to speak of a brace of overfed, half-blind pugs.
"I am in exile," the letter concluded, "and the dragon is a watchful jailer. But she sleeps in the afternoon, and at three o'clock to-morrow I will be inside the Charles street gate."
"To-morrow" meant to-day, and until lunch time Jack's brush flew energetically over the canvas. He was at the trysting-place at the appointed hour, and Madge was there waiting for him, so ravishingly dressed that he could scarcely resist the temptation to gather her in his arms. As they strolled through the park he rather gloomily described his visit from Stephen Foster, but the girl's half-smiling, half-tearful look of affection reassured him.
"You foolish boy!" she said, chidingly. "As if there were any danger of your losing me. Why, I wouldn't give you up if you wanted me to! I think you got the best of father, dear. He understands now, and by and by he will relent. He is a good sort, really, and you will like him when you know him better."
"We made a bad beginning," Jack said, ruefully.
They had reached the lake by this time, and they went on to a bench in a shady and sequestered spot. Madge's high spirits seemed suddenly to desert her, and she looked pensively across the glimmering water to the tall mansions of Hanover Terrace.