“I have thought of it.”

Sylvester looked sharply at him. “Not in love, are you?”

Shield’s face hardened. “No.”

“If you’re still letting a cursed silly calf affair rankle with you, you’re a fool!” said Sylvester. “I’ve forgotten the rights of it, if ever I knew them, but they don’t interest me. Most women will play you false, and I never met one yet that wasn’t a fool at heart. I’m offering you a marriage of convenience.”

“Does she understand that?” asked Shield.

“Wouldn’t understand anything else,” replied Sylvester. “She’s a Frenchwoman.”

Sir Tristram stepped down from the dais, and went over to the fireplace. Sylvester watched him in silence, and after a moment he said: “It might answer.”

“You’re the last of your name,” Sylvester reminded him.

“I know it. I’ve every intention of marrying.”

“No one in your eye?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll marry Eustacie,” said Sylvester. “Pull the bell!”

Sir Tristram obeyed, but said with a look of amusement: “Your dying wish, Sylvester?”

“I shan’t live the week out,” replied Sylvester cheerfully. “Heart and hard living, Tristram. Don’t pull a long face at my funeral! Eighty years is enough for any man, and I’ve had the gout for twenty of them.” He saw his valet come into the room, and said: “Send Mademoiselle to me.”

“You take a great deal for granted, Sylvester,” remarked Sir Tristram, as the valet went out again.

Sylvester had leaned his head back against the pillows, and closed his eyes. There was a suggestion of exhaustion in his attitude, but when he opened his eyes they were very much alive, and impishly intelligent. “You would not have come here, my dear Tristram, had you not already made up your mind.”

Sir Tristram smiled a little reluctantly, and transferred his attention to the fire.

It was not long before the door opened again. Sir Tristram turned as Mademoiselle de Vauban came into the room, and stood looking at her under bent brows.

His first thought was that she was unmistakably a Frenchwoman, and not in the least the type of female he admired. She had glossy black hair, dressed in the newest fashion, and her eyes were so dark that it was hard to know whether they were brown or black. Her inches were few, but her figure was extremely good, and she bore herself with an air. She paused just inside the door, and, at once perceiving Sir Tristram, gave back his stare with one every whit as searching and a good deal more speculative.

Sylvester allowed them to weigh one another for several moments before he spoke, but presently he said: “Come here, my child. And you, Tristram.”

The promptness with which his granddaughter obeyed this summons augured a docility wholly belied by the resolute, not to say wilful, set of her pretty mouth. She trod gracefully across the room, and curtseyed to Sylvester before stepping up on to the dais. Sir Tristram came more slowly to the bedside, nor did it escape Eustacie’s notice that he had apparently looked his fill at her. His eyes, still sombre and slightly frowning, now rested on Sylvester.

Sylvester stretched out his left hand to Eustacie. “Let me present to you, my child, your cousin Tristram.”

“Your very obedient cousin,” said Shield, bowing.

“It is to me a great happiness to meet my cousin,” enunciated Eustacie with prim civility and a slight, not unpleasing French accent.

“I am a little tired,” said Sylvester. “If I were not I might allow you time to become better acquainted. And yet I don’t know: I dare say it’s as well as it is,” he added cynically. “If you want a formal offer, Eustacia, no doubt Tristram will make you one—after dinner.”

“I do not want a formal offer,” replied Mademoiselle de Vauban. “It is to me a matter quite immaterial, but my name is Eustacie, which is, enfin, a very good name, and it is not Eu-sta-ci-a, which I cannot at all pronounce, and which I find excessively ugly.”

This speech, which was delivered in a firm and perfectly self-possessed voice, had the effect of making Sir Tristram cast another of his searching glances at the lady. He said with a faint smile: “I hope I may be permitted to call you Eustacie, cousin?”

“Certainly; it will be quite convenable,” replied Eustacie, bestowing a brilliant smile upon him.

“She’s eighteen,” said Sylvester abruptly. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-one,” answered Sir Tristram uncompromisingly.

“H’m!” said Sylvester. “A very excellent age.”

“For what?” asked Eustacie.

“For marriage, miss!”

Eustacie gave him a thoughtful look, but volunteered no further remark.

“You may go down to dinner now,” said Sylvester. “I regret that I am unable to bear you company, but I trust that the Nuits I have instructed Porson to give you will help you to overcome any feeling of gêne which might conceivably attack you.”

“You are all consideration, sir,” said Shield. “Shall we go, cousin?”

Eustacie, who did not appear to suffer from gêne, assented, curtseyed again to her grandfather, and accompanied Sir Tristram downstairs to the dining-room.

The butler had set their places at opposite ends of the great table, an arrangement in which both tacitly acquiesced, though it made conversation a trifle remote. Dinner, which was served in the grand manner, was well chosen, well cooked, and very long. Sir Tristram noticed that his prospective bride enjoyed a hearty appetite, and discovered after five minutes that she possessed a flow of artless conversation, quite unlike any he had been used to listen to in London drawing-rooms. He was prepared to find her embarrassed by a situation which struck him as being fantastic, and was somewhat startled when she remarked : “It is a pity that you are so dark, because I do not like dark men in general. However, one must accustom oneself.”

“Thank you,” said Shield.

“If my grandpapa had left me in France it is probable that I should have married a Duke,” said Eustacie. “My uncle—the present Vicomte, you understand—certainly intended it.”

“You would more probably have gone to the guillotine,” replied Sir Tristram, depressingly matter of fact.

“Yes, that is quite true,” agreed Eustacie. “We used to talk of it, my cousin Henriette and I. We made up our minds we should be entirely brave, not crying, of course, but perhaps a little pale, in a proud way. Henriette wished to go to the guillotine en grande tenue, but that was only because she had a court dress of yellow satin which she thought became her much better than it did really. For me, I think one should wear white to the guillotine if one is quite young, and not carry anything except perhaps a handkerchief. Do you not agree?”

“I don’t think it signifies what you wear if you are on your way to the scaffold,” replied Sir Tristram, quite unappreciative of the picture his cousin was dwelling on with such evident admiration.

She looked at him in surprise. “Don’t you? But consider! You would be very sorry for a young girl in a tumbril, dressed all in white, pale, but quite unafraid, and not attending to the canaille at all, but—”

“I should be very sorry for anyone in a tumbril, whatever their age or sex or apparel,” interrupted Sir Tristram.

“You would be more sorry for a young girl—all alone, and perhaps bound,” said Eustacie positively.

“You wouldn’t be all alone. There would be a great many other people in the tumbril with you,” said Sir Tristram.

Eustacie eyed him with considerable displeasure. “In my tumbril there would not have been a great many other people,” she said.

Perceiving that argument on this point would be fruitless, Sir Tristram merely looked sceptical and refrained from speech.

“A Frenchman,” said Eustacie, “would understand at once.”

“I am not a Frenchman,” replied Sir Tristram.

“Ça se voit!” retorted Eustacie.

Sir Tristram served himself from a dish of mutton steaks and cucumber.

“The people whom I have met in England,” said Eustacie after a short silence, “consider it very romantic that I was rescued from the Terror.”

Her tone suggested strongly that he also ought to consider it romantic, but as he was fully aware that Sylvester had travelled to Paris some time before the start of the Terror, and had removed his granddaughter from France in the most unexciting way possible, he only replied: “I dare say.”

“I know a family who escaped from Paris in a cart full of turnips,” said Eustacie. “The soldiers stuck their bayonets into the turnips, too.”

“I trust they did not also stick them into the family?”

“No, but they might easily have done so. You do not at all realize what it is like in Paris now. One lives in constant anxiety. It is even dangerous to step out of doors.”

“It must be a great relief for you to find yourself in Sussex.”

She fixed her large eyes on his face, and said: “Yes, but—do you not like exciting things, mon cousin?”

“I do not like revolutions, if that is what you mean.”

She shook her head. “Ah no, but romance, and—and adventure!”

He smiled. “When I was eighteen I expect I did.”

A depressed silence fell. “Grandpère says that you will make me a very good husband,” said Eustacie presently.

Taken by surprise, Shield replied stiffly: “I shall endeavour to do so, cousin.”

“And I expect,” said Eustacie, despondently inspecting a dish of damson tartlets, “that he is quite right. You look to me like a good husband.”

“Indeed?” said Sir Tristram, unreasonably annoyed by thisremark. “I am sorry that I cannot return the compliment by telling you that you look like a good wife.”