Considering it time to bring the purely financial side of the situation under discussion, Madame de Melcourt explained to her niece that she, the Marquise, had nothing to do, in her own person, with the extraordinary person who was about to arrive.  Her part would be accomplished when once she had handed over the dot either to Olivia or to her trustees.  As the passing of this sum through Miss Guion’s hands was to be no more than a formality, the question of trustees was not worth taking up.  With the transfer of securities for the amount agreed upon from the one name to the other—­a piece of business which would be carried out by Davis & Stern—­the Marquise considered that she would have done all for which she could be called upon.  Everything else concerned Olivia and her father and Davenant.  Her own interest in the young man would be satisfied with a glance of curiosity.

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  Olivia having withdrawn to wait on her father, Madame de Melcourt bade him light his cigar while she herself puffed daintily at a cigarette.  If she was a little grotesque in doing it, he had seen more than one elderly Englishwoman who, in the same pastime, was even more so.

Taking one thing with another, he liked his future great-aunt by marriage.  That is, he liked a connection that would bring him into touch with such things in the world as he held to be important.  While he had the scorn natural to the Englishman of the Service class for anything out of England that pretended to be an aristocracy, he admitted that the old French royalist cause had claims to distinction.  The atmosphere of it clinging to one who was presumably in the heart of its counsels restored him to that view of his marriage as an alliance between high contracting powers which events in Boston had made so lamentably untenable.  If he was disconcerted, it was by her odd way of keeping him at arm’s-length.

“She doesn’t like me, what?” he had more than once said to Olivia, and with some misgiving.

Olivia could only answer:  “I think she must.  She’s said a good many times that you were chic and distinguished.  That’s a great deal for any Englishman from her.”

“She acts as if she had something up her sleeve.”

That had become something like a conviction with him; but to-day he flattered himself that he had made some progress in her graces.  His own spirits, too, were so high that he could be affable to Guion, who appeared at table for the only time since the day of their first meeting.  Hollow-checked, hollow-eyed, his figure shrunken, and his handsome hand grown so thin that the ring kept slipping from his finger, Guion essayed, in view of his powerful relative’s vindication—­for so he liked to think of