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Blake flushed at this fulsome extravagance, particularly as he saw Myra Nell making faces at him. "Fortunately everything is arranged now," he assured his hostess. But this did not satisfy Miss Warren, who, with apparent innocence, questioned the two men until Papa La Branche began to bog and flounder in his explanations.
At this hour!" "I'm working for the Board of Health, and those are my orders," declared outraged authority. "It was imperative that I see Miss Fabrizi; the blame for this complication is entirely mine," Norvin assured the old creole. The representative of the Board of Health inquired, loudly: "Didn't the doctors tell you that nobody could come or go, Mr. La Branche?" "They did."
Sometimes I imagine perhaps it will be like that when we get through with this world and wake up into what's after that the things we've passed over pretty much here and been vague about will blaze out as the eternal verities. A miracle happened that day in your September garden. You've surely read "Sur la Branche" that book written around a woman's belief in the Providence of God?
During the afternoon his excitement increased deliciously, and that evening he found himself pacing the shaded street near the La Branche home, with the eager restlessness of a lover. It was indeed late when Vittoria finally appeared. "Myra Nell is such a chatterbox," she explained, "that I couldn't get her to bed. Have you waited long?" "I dare say. I'm not sure."
"I am rather good at it," Norvin confessed, whereat Papa La Branche seemed about to embrace him. "You are sent from heaven!" he declared. "You deliver me from darkness. Thirty-seven games of Napoleon to-day! Think of it! I was dealing the thirty-eighth when you came. But piquet! Ah, that is a game, even though my angel wife abominates it.
Some one had entered the kitchen at their back. A light flashed through the window, the door opened, and Mr. La Branche, clad in a rusty satin dressing-gown and carpet slippers, stood revealed, a lamp in his hand. "I thought I heard voices," he said. "What is the trouble?" "There's no trouble at all, sir," Blake protested, then found himself absurdly embarrassed.
He arrived at the La Branche house early that afternoon, and found young Rilleau sitting on a box beneath Myra Nell's window, with the girl herself embowered as before in a frame of roses. "Any symptoms yet?" Norvin inquired, agreeably. "Thousands! I'm slowly dying." Lecompte nodded dolefully. "Look at her color." "No doubt it's the glow from those red roses that I see in her cheeks."
I have never lied to my wife, M'sieu except upon rare occasions," Mr. La Branche chuckled merrily. "And even then only about trifles. So, the result? Absolute trust; supreme confidence on her part. A happy state for man and wife, is it not? Ha! I am a very good liar, an adept, as you shall see, for I am not calloused by practice and therefore liable to forgetfulness.
Myra Nell's ready acquiescence was a shock to Norvin, arguing, as it did, that these people regarded the Countess Margherita as an employee. Could it be that they were so utterly blind? He was allowed little time for such thoughts, however, since Myra Nell set herself to the agreeable task of unmasking her lover and confounding Montegut La Branche.
She had flounced into Vittoria's room to gossip while she combed her hair. "Mr. La Branche says it's all his fault, and he's terribly grieved," Miss Fabrizi told her. "Now, now! Your eyes are fairly popping out." "Wouldn't your eyes pop out if the handsomest, the richest, the bravest man in New Orleans deliberately took his life in his hands to see you and be near you?"
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