“What! now? You know that serious conversation is not my forte; and to-day all is in confusion. We have sent out five hundred invitations, it will be superb! Come here, then, if it is absolutely necessary. I have arranged a veranda for smoking. Come and see if it is not convenient?”
She went with him into a veranda covered with striped cotton, furnished with a sofa and jardinière, but rather dismal-looking with the rain pattering on the zinc roof.
Jack said to himself, “I had better have written,” and did not know what to say first.
“Well?” said Charlotte, leaning her chin on her hand in that graceful attitude that some women adopt when they listen. He hesitated a moment, as one hesitates in placing a heavy load upon an étagère of trifles, for that which he had to say seemed too much for that pretty little head that leaned toward him.
“I should like—I should like to talk to you of my father,” he said, with some hesitation.
On the end of her tongue she had the words, “What folly!” If she did not utter them, the expression of her face, in which were to be read amazement and fear, spoke for her.
“It is too sad for us, my child, to discuss. But still, painful as it is to me, I understand your feelings, and am ready to gratify you. Besides,” she added, solemnly, “I have always intended, when you were twenty, to reveal to you the secret of your birth.”
It was time now for him to look astonished. Had she forgotten that three months previous she had made this disclosure. Nevertheless, he uttered no protest, he wished to compare her story of to-day with an older narration. How well he knew her!
“Is it true that my father was noble?” he asked, suddenly.
“Indeed he was, my child.”