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If she seemed older, graver, sadder perhaps, the change was natural to one who had passed through trials so sordid and so searching. A month of marriage, a month of England, would restore all her youth and freshness. Nevertheless he was glad to be alone with Madame de Melcourt. It was the moment he had waited for, the moment of paying some fitting tribute to her generosity.
Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.
He exchanged the cottage at Newport for one at Lenox, and, giving up the house in Boston, withdrew to Tory Hill. Ceasing himself to go into society, he sent his daughter abroad for a large portion of her time, either in the care of Madame de Melcourt or, in London, under the wing of some of the American ladies prominent in English life.
Olivia acknowledged this approval with a smile and a blush, as she went about the drawing-room trying to give it something of its former air. With the new turn of events it had become necessary to restore the house to a condition fit for occupancy. Madame de Melcourt had moved into it with her maid and her man, announcing her intention to remain till she got ready to depart. Her bearing was that of Napoleon making a temporary stay in some German or Italian palace for the purposes of national reorganization and public weal. At the present instant she was enthroned amid cushions in a corner of the sofa, watching Olivia dispose of such bric-
But if my niece hadn't abandoned me " "Why shouldn't you come home, madame?" Davenant suggested, touched by so much that was tragic. "You wouldn't find any one after the sou there." "They're all about me," she whispered "the Melcourt. They're all over the house. They come and settle on me, and I can't shake them off.
Owing to this prospect Olivia had been compelled to decline a comte and a vicomte of crusading ancestry, procured at some pains by Madame de Melcourt; but when she also refused the eminently eligible Duc de Berteuil, whose terms in the way of dowry were reasonable, while he offered her a splendidly historic name and background, the Marquise not unnaturally lost her temper and declared that she washed her hands of her grandniece once for all.
The brief conversation to this effect having taken place before luncheon, Madame de Melcourt pursued other aspects of the subject with Colonel Ashley when that repast was ended and coffee was being served to them in the library. Olivia having withdrawn to wait on her father, Madame de Melcourt bade him light his cigar while she herself puffed daintily at a cigarette.
It was one more detail that removed her beyond his sphere and made her inaccessible to his yearnings. From the obliging post-office clerk at the bank on which he drew a gentleman posted in the movements of all distinguished Americans on the continent of Europe he learned that "la campagne" for the Marquise de Melcourt meant the château of Melcourt-le-Danois in the neighborhood of Harfleur.
"If it's business to give Cousin Henry what would be nearly a hundred thousand pounds in English money, with no prospect that any one can see of his ever getting it back that is, not unless old Madame de Melcourt " "Oh, I say! Then he's one of your beastly millionaires, by Jove! grind the noses off the poor, and that sort of thing, to play Haroun-al-Raschid with the cash." "Not in the least.
"It would have been a great alliance what I've been so much in need of. The Melcourt well, they're all very well old noblesse de la Normandie, and all that but poor! mais pauvres! and as provincial as a curé de campagne. When I married my poor husband but we won't go into that I've been a widow since I was so high ever since 1870 with my own way to make.
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