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Updated: May 9, 2025
Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout, was scornfully superior on the subject of big game shooting. Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion. "I don't know about an heiress," she said reflectively. "There's Emmeline Chetrof of course.
"By the way," he said to his gasping and gulping victim when the infliction was over, "you said Chetrof, didn't you? I believe I've been asked to be kind to you. As a beginning you can clean out my study this afternoon. Be awfully careful how you dust the old china. If you break any don't come and tell me but just go and drown yourself somewhere; it will save you from a worse fate."
The house in Blue Street had been left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to pass to her as a wedding present. Emmeline was now seventeen and passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could be safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood.
After all, that was part of the fun of the thing, and most things have their amusing side if one knows where to look for it. There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in response to a hearty friendly summons to "come in." "I've come to be caned," he said breathlessly; adding by way of identification, "my name's Chetrof."
Michael would come pattering up her stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline Chetrof was going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record Office as the case might be, and then there would be an uprooting of her life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a wandering forth to some cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the stately Van der Meulen and its companion host of beautiful and desirable things would be stuffed and stowed away in soulless surroundings, like courtly emigres fallen on evil days.
Lancelot Chetrof stood at the end of a long bare passage, restlessly consulting his watch and fervently wishing himself half an hour older with a certain painful experience already registered in the past; unfortunately it still belonged to the future, and what was still more horrible, to the immediate future.
"Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest Department. He's got nothing but his pay and they can't be married for four or five years; an absurdly long engagement, don't you think so?
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