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Updated: June 20, 2025
Lady Ranscomb was seated at a little wicker table with her daughter Dorise, a dainty, fair-haired girl with intense blue eyes, who was wearing a rather daring jazzing gown of pale-blue, the scantiness of which a year or two before would have been voted quite beyond the pale for a lady, and yet in our broad-minded to-day, the day of undressing on the stage and in the home, it was nothing more than "smart."
One woman, stout and of Hebrew type, sitting with three men, was wildly merry, for she had won the equivalent to sixty thousand pounds. All that recklessness jarred upon the young man's nerves. He tried to close his ears to it all, and ascended again to his room, where he sat in silent despondency till it was time for him to go round to the Metropole to join Lady Ranscomb and Dorise.
She was thinking of Hugh's strange disappearance, and how he had broken his word to her. Meanwhile, Lady Ranscomb, secretly very glad that Hugh had been prevented from accompanying them, and centring all her hopes upon her daughter's marriage with George Sherrard, sat chattering with a Mrs. Down, the fat wife of a war-profiteer, whose acquaintance she had made in Paris six months before.
"He often does in persons who are quite ignorant of his existence." "That is my own case. I never heard of him until I was in Genoa, a fugitive," said Hugh. "But you told me I shall receive a message from Miss Ranscomb by special messenger. When?" "When you are in Malines." "But all this is very strange. Will the mysterious messenger call upon Miss Ranscomb in London?" "Of course.
She knew that a dozen mothers with eligible feminine encumbrances were trying to angle him, and that Lady Ranscomb was greatly envied by them. But to be the wife of the self-conscious ass well, as she has already bluntly told him, she would die rather than become Mrs. George Sherrard. "Intrigue!" the girl retorted. "Why, from first to last the whole thing is a plot between my mother and yourself.
"Why! because I love Dorise Ranscomb. But Louise interests me, and I'm worried on her account because of that infernal fellow Charles Benton. Louise poses as his adopted daughter. Benton is a bachelor of forty-five, and, according to his story, he adopted Louise when she was a child and put her to school. Her parentage is a mystery. After leaving school she at first went to live with a Mrs.
The man with her was the Count d'Autun. The white cavalier pretended to take no interest in them, but was, nevertheless, watching intently. At last he saw the girl's partner bow, and leaving her, he crossed to greet a stout Frenchwoman in a plain domino. In a moment the cavalier was at the girl's side. "Please do not betray surprise, Miss Ranscomb," he said in a low, refined voice.
At that moment Lady Ranscomb and Walter Brock joined them, whereupon the former exclaimed to her daughter: "Did you see that woman over there? still playing the woman in black and the jade beads, against whom Monsieur Courtin warned us?" "Yes, mother, I noticed her. I've just been telling Hugh about her." "A mysterious person eh?" laughed Hugh with well-affected indifference.
Louise's cheeks reddened slightly, as she replied with affected carelessness: "If he doesn't care to write, I shall trouble no longer." "He's still abroad, is he not? The last I heard of him was that he was at Monte Carlo with that Ranscomb girl." Mention of Dorise Ranscomb caused the girl's cheeks to colour more deeply. "Yes," she said, "I heard that also."
"I wonder if I dare go there to see him? What a dead-alive hole!" Not until then did Dorise recollect that the girl had not given her Hugh's address. She had, perhaps, purposely withheld it. This fact she told Hugh's friend, who replied over the wire: "Well, it is highly satisfactory news, in any case. We can only wait, Miss Ranscomb. But this must relieve your mind, I feel sure."
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