As usual Lord Tony’s eloquence was not equal to all that it should have expressed. He blushed furiously and with a quaint, shy gesture, passed his large, well-shaped hand over his smooth, brown hair. “I am not much, I know,” he continued with a winning air of self-deprecation, “and you are far above me as the stars—you are so wonderful, so clever, so accomplished and I am nothing at all … but … but I have plenty of highborn connections, and I have plenty of money and influential friends … and … and Sir Percy Blakeney, who is the most accomplished and finest gentleman in England, calls me his friend.”
She smiled at his eagerness. She loved him for his clumsy little ways, his halting speech, that big loving heart of his which was too full of fine and noble feelings to find vent in mere words.
“Have you ever met a finer man in all the world?” he added enthusiastically.
Yvonne de Kernogan smiled once more. Her recollections of Sir Percy Blakeney showed her an elegant man of the world, whose mind seemed chiefly occupied on the devising and the wearing of exquisite clothes, in the uttering of lively witticisms for the entertainment of his royal friend and the ladies of his entourage: it showed her a man of great wealth and vast possessions who seemed willing to spend both in the mere pursuit of pleasures. She liked Sir Percy Blakeney well enough, but she could not understand clever and charming Marguerite Blakeney’s adoration for her inane and foppish husband, nor the wholehearted admiration openly lavished upon him by men like Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, my lord Hastings, and others. She would gladly have seen her own dear milor choose a more sober and intellectual friend. But then she loved him for his marvellous power of wholehearted friendship, for his loyalty to those he cared for, for everything in fact that made up the sum total of his winning personality, and she pinned her faith on that other mysterious friend whose individuality vastly intrigued her.
“I am more interested in your anonymous friend,” she said quaintly, “than in Sir Percy Blakeney. But he too is kindness itself and Lady Blakeney is an angel. I like to think that the happiest days of my life—our honeymoon, my dear lord—will be spent in their house.”
“Blakeney has lent me Combwich Hall for as long as we like to stay there. We’ll drive thither directly after the service, dear heart, and then we’ll send a courier to your father and ask for his blessing and his forgiveness.”
“Poor father!” sighed Yvonne again. But evidently compassion for the father whom she had elected to deceive did not weigh over heavily in the balance of her happiness. Her little hand once more stole like a timid and confiding bird into the shelter of his firm grasp.
V
In the card-room at His Highness’ table Sir Percy Blakeney was holding the bank and seemingly luck was dead against him. Around the various tables the ladies stood about, chattering and hindering the players. Nothing appeared serious tonight, not even the capricious chances of hazard.
His Royal Highness was in rare good humour, for he was winning prodigiously.
Her Grace of Flintshire placed her perfumed and beringed hand upon Sir Percy Blakeney’s shoulder; she stood behind his chair, chattering incessantly in a high flutey treble just like a canary. Blakeney vowed that she was so ravishing that she had put Dame Fortune to flight.
“You have not yet told us, Sir Percy,” she said roguishly, “how you came to arrive so late at the ball.”
“Alas, madam,” he sighed dolefully, “ ’twas the fault of my cravat.”
“Your cravat?”
“Aye indeed! You see I spent the whole of today in perfecting my new method for tying a butterfly bow, so as to give the neck an appearance of utmost elegance with a minimum of discomfort. Lady Blakeney will bear me out when I say that I set my whole mind to my task. Was I not busy all day m’dear?” he added, making a formal appeal to Marguerite, who stood immediately behind His Highness’ chair, and with her luminous eyes, full of merriment and shining with happiness, fixed upon her husband.
“You certainly spent a considerable time in front of the looking-glass,” she said gaily, “with two valets in attendance and my lord Tony an interested spectator in the proceedings.”
“There now!” rejoined Sir Percy triumphantly, “her ladyship’s testimony thoroughly bears me out. And now you shall see what Tony says on the matter. Tony! Where’s Tony!” he added as his lazy grey eyes sought the brilliant crowd in the card-room. “Tony, where the devil are you?”
There was no reply, and anon Sir Percy’s merry gaze encountered that of M. le duc de Kernogan who, dressed in sober black, looked strangely conspicuous in the midst of this throng of bright-coloured butterflies, and whose grave eyes, as they rested on the gorgeous figure of the English exquisite, held a world of contempt in their glance.
“Ah! M. le duc,” continued Blakeney, returning that scornful look with his habitual good-humoured one, “I had not noticed that mademoiselle Yvonne was not with you, else I had not thought of inquiring so loudly for my friend Tony.”
“My lord Antoine is dancing with my daughter, Sir Percy,” said the other man gravely, in excellent if somewhat laboured English, “he had my permission to ask her.”
“And is a thrice happy man in consequence,” retorted Blakeney lightly, “though I fear me M. Martin-Roget’s wrath will descend upon my poor Tony’s head with unexampled vigour in consequence.”
“M. Martin-Roget is not here this evening,” broke in the Duchess, “and methought,” she added in a discreet whisper, “that my lord Tony was all the
