As he expected, the shock calmed her.  Notwithstanding her mask, she grew suddenly haggard, though her eyes, which—­since she had never been able to put poudre de riz or cherry paste in them—­were almost as fine as ever, instantly flashed out the signal of the Guion pride.  Her fluffy head went up, and her little figure stiffened as she entrenched herself again behind the arm-chair.  Her only hint of flinching came from a slackening in the flow of speech and a higher, thinner quality in the voice.

“Has my nephew, Henry Guion, been doing things—­that—­that would send him—­to prison?”

In spite of herself the final words came out with a gasp.

“It’s a long story, madame—­or, at least, a complicated one.  I could explain it, if you’d give me the time.”

“Sit down.”

They took seats at last.  Owing to the old lady’s possession of what she herself called a business mind he found the tale easy in the telling.  Her wits being quick and her questions pertinent, she was soon in command of the facts.  She was soon, too, in command of herself.  The first shock having passed, she was able to go into complete explanations with courage.

“So that,” he concluded, “now that Mr. Guion is safe, if Miss Guion could only marry—­the man—­the man she cares for—­everything would be put as nearly right as we can make it.”

“And at present they are at a deadlock.  She won’t marry him if he has to sell his property, and so forth; and he can’t marry her, and live in debt to you.  Is that it?”

“That’s it, madame, exactly.  You’ve put it in a nutshell.”

She looked at him hardly.  “And what has it all got to do with me?”

He looked at her steadily in his turn.  “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t care to live in debt to me, either.”

She was startled.  “Who?  I?  En voila une idee!”

“I thought,” he went on, “that possibly the Guion sense of family honor—­”

“Fiddle-faddle!  There’s no sense of family honor among Americans.  There can’t be.  You can only have family honor where, as with us, the family is the unit; whereas, with you, the unit is the individual.  The American individual may have a sense of honor; but the American family is only a disintegrated mush.  What you really thought was that you might get your money back.”

“If you like, madame.  That’s another way of putting it.  If the family paid me, Miss Guion would feel quite differently—­and so would Colonel Ashley.”

“When you say the family,” she sniffed, “you mean me.”

“In the sense that I naturally think first of its most distinguished member.  And, of course, the greater the distinction the greater must be—­shall I call it the indignity?—­of living under an obligation—­”

“Am I to understand that you put up this money—­that’s your American term, isn’t it?—­that you put up this money in the expectation that I would pay you back?”