“Alas,” she said, “I’m booked already. I have an elderly relation in the Boulevard Haussmann who stays here all summer this year on account of alterations in the house which she superintends personally, and I’ve promised.”
“I hope she hasn’t sacrificed you at a dinner table, too,” Denby said, “because if you are free to-night you’d confer a blessing on a fellow countryman if you’d come with Monty and me to the Ambassadeurs. Polin is funnier than ever.”
“I’d love to,” she cried. “You have probably delivered me from my aunt’s dismal dinner. I hadn’t an engagement but now I can swear to one truthfully. Men are usually so vain that if you say you’re dreadfully sorry but you’ve another engagement they really believe it. The dear things think no other cause would make a woman refuse. But my aunt would interrogate me till I faltered and contradicted myself.”
They left her later at one of those great mansions in the Boulevard Haussmann. The house was enlaced with scaffolding and workmen swarmed over its roof.
“It’s old Miss Woodwarde’s house,” Monty explained. “She’s worth millions and will probably leave it to Alice, who doesn’t need any, because she’s the only one of all her relatives who speaks the truth and doesn’t fawn and flatter.”
“It takes greater strength of mind than poor relations usually have, to tell rich relatives the truth,” Steven reminded him.
Monty had evidently recovered his good spirits. “I knew you’d like her,” he said later, “and I knew she’d take to you. We’ll have a corking dinner and a jolly good time.”
“There’s one thing I want to ask of you,” Denby said gravely. “Don’t give any particulars about me. If she’s the sort I think her she won’t ask, but you’ve got a bad habit of wanting people to hear how I fished you out of the river. I want to slip into New York without any advertisement of the fact. I’m not the son of a plutocrat as you are. I’m the hard-up son of a man who was once rich but is now dead and forgotten.”
“Do hard-up men hand a million francs across for a string of pearls to put in their tobacco-pouches?” Monty demanded shrewdly.
“You may regard that as an investment if you like,” Denby answered. “It may be all my capital is tied up in it.”