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The man looked at her with a doubting, shame-faced glance. "I expect you're right," he said abruptly. "I ought to have thought of it. I'll make my will when I'm in England this time I ought to have done so before." Suddenly Coxeter leant forward. He felt the time had come when he really must put an end to this most unseemly conversation. "Mrs. Archdale?" he spoke loudly, insistently.
Perhaps because he was so near, John Coxeter remained in her thoughts. Almost alone of those human beings with whom life brought her in contact, he made no demand on her sympathy, and very little on her time.
How wildly she spoke, how unlike herself she seemed to-day how unlike what she had been during the whole of their terrible ordeal. Already that ordeal had become, to him, something to be treasured. There is no lack of physical courage in the breed of Englishmen to which John Coxeter belonged. Pain, entirely unassociated with shame, holds out comparatively little terror to such as he.
"I trust you won't be offended if I ask whether you are, or are not, a married lady?" The sweetmeat man's voice had a curious note of shamed interrogation threading itself through the words. Coxeter felt surprised and rather shocked. This was what came of allowing oneself to become familiar with an underbred stranger!
Nan Archdale had given the man a note to Coxeter, and it was characteristic of the latter that, while resenting what Mrs. Archdale had done, he had been at some pains when in Paris to see the man in question.
Beauty the Conqueror; or the Death of Mark Anthony, a Tragedy. Besides these plays, Mr. Coxeter says, he is author of the two following, which were never printed till with his works in 2 vols. 8vo. 1719, dedicated by Briscoe the bookseller to the duke of Chandois. The Grumbler, a Comedy of three acts, scene Paris. The Tyrant King of Crete, a Tragedy.
Coxeter felt a pang of sincere pity for the poor fellow; a cad, no doubt but an English cad, cursed with an emotional French wife! Then his attention had been most happily diverted by the unexpected appearance of Mrs. Archdale. She had come up behind him very quietly, and he had heard her speak before actually seeing her. "Mr.
He felt sure she was not fit to live alone; he knew she ought to be surrounded by the kind of care and protection which only a husband can properly bestow on a woman. He, Coxeter, would have known how to detach her from the unsuitable people by whom she was always surrounded.
Coxeter's thoughts leapt back into the present with disagreeable abruptness. Their Jewish fellow-traveller, the man who had thrust on Mrs. Archdale such unseemly confidences, had got up. He was now heading straight for the place where Mrs. Archdale was sitting. Coxeter quickly decided that the fellow must not be allowed to bore Mrs. Archdale.
Coxeter gathered that the liaison had lasted ten years that it had begun, in fact, very soon after the man had first come to Paris. In addition to his feeling of wrath that Nan Archdale should become cognisant of so sordid a tale, there was associated a feeling of shame that he, Coxeter, had overheard what it had not been meant that he should hear.
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