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On all great occasions in life, the Baroness de Melide had taken her overburdened heart in a carriage and pair to St. Germain en Pre. For she had always had a carriage and pair for the mere ringing of a bell ever since her girlhood, when the Baron de Melide had, with much assistance from her, laid his name and fortune at her feet.
He was, however, the Baron de Melide, and his manner had that repose which belongs to the new aristocracy of France and to the shreds that remain, here and there, of the old. "Left my ambulance to subordinates," he explained as he shook Lory's hand. "Humanity is an excellent quality, but one's friends come first. It has taken me some time to find you. Have procured your parole for you.
These were days of quick promotion, of comet-like reputations and of great careers cut short. De Vasselot had written to Jane de Melide the previous night, telling her of his movements in the immediate future, of his promotion, of his hopes. One hope which he did not mention was that Denise might be at Frejus, and would see the letter.
You do not know what wretches we are compared to men compared especially to some few of them; to a Baron Henri de Melide or a Count de Vasselot who are honourable men, my cousin." She touched him lightly on the shoulder with one finger, and then turned away to look with thoughtful eyes out of the window. "I wonder what is in that letter," said Lory, returning to his pen.
It would seem that Lory de Vasselot had played the part of a stormy petrel when he visited Paris, for that calm Frenchman, the Baron de Melide, packed his wife off to Provence the same night, and the letter that Lory wrote to the Abbe Susini, reaching Olmeta three days later, aroused its recipient from a contemplative perusal of the Petit Bastiais as if it had been a bomb-shell.
Madame de Melide would take no denial. "I have already heard of Denise's good fortune; and from whom do you think?" she wrote. "From my dear good cousin, Lory de Vasselot, who is, if you will believe it, a Corsican neighbour the Vasselot and Perucca estates actually adjoin. Both, I need hardly tell you, bristle with bandits, and are quite impossible.
Indeed, our ignorance of social France is only surpassed by the French ignorance of social England. The Baroness de Melide was rich, however, and the rich, as we all know, have nothing to fear in this world. As a matter of fact, Monsieur de Melide dated his nobility from Napoleon's creation, and madame's grandfather was of the Emigration.
For the schoolgirl in the Rue du Cherche-Midi was quite right when she had pounced upon Mademoiselle Brun's secret, which, however, lay safely dead and buried on that battlefield. And Mademoiselle Brun had taught, had shaped Henri de Melide; and Henri de Melide had always been Lory de Vasselot's best friend.
As they stood on deck, Denise soon perceived the little pier where there were, even at this early hour, a few of those indefatigable Mediterranean Waltons who fish and fish and catch nothing, all through the sunny day. Presently Mademoiselle Brun caught sight of a small dot of colour which seemed to move spasmodically up and down. "I see the parasol," she said, "of Jane de Melide.
Then that placid man, the Baron Henri de Melide, came into the room, and shook hands in the then novel English fashion, looking at his lifelong friend with a dull and apathetic eye. "From the frontier?" he inquired. Lory laughed curtly. He had returned from that Last Frontier, where each one of us shall inevitably be asked "Si monsieur a quelque chose a declarer?"
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