“No,” he answered, “no!”

“My father joins us there.  We have kept Miss Chantry waiting too long.  She will be tired of sitting in the carriage.”

Chattering with every breath Annabel entrained us both to the court, my poor master hobbling after her a victim, and staring at me with hatred when I tried to get a word in undertone.

I put Annabel into the coach, and Miss Chantry made frigid room for me.

“Hasten yourself, Lazarre,” said Mademoiselle de Chaumont.

I looked back at the poor man who was being played with, and she cried out laughing—­

“Did you go to Russia a Parisian to come back a bear?”

I entered her coach, intending to take my leave as soon as I had seen Count de Chaumont.  Annabel chattered all the way about civil marriage, and directed Miss Chantry to wait for us while we went in to the mayor.  I was perhaps too indifferent to the trick.  The usually sharp governess, undecided and piqued, sat still.

The count was not in the mayor’s office.  A civil marriage was going forward, and a strange bridal party looked at us.

“Now, Lazarre,” the strategist confided, “your dearest Annabel is going to cover herself with Parisian disgrace.  You don’t know how maddening it is to have every step dogged by a woman who never was, never could have been—­and manifestly never will be—­young!  Wasn’t that a divine flash about the corbeille and the mayor?  Miss Chantry will wait outside half a day.  As I said, she will be very tired of sitting in the carriage.  This is what you must do; smuggle me out another way; call another carriage, and take me for a drive and wicked dinner.  I don’t care what the consequences are, if you don’t!”

I said I certainly didn’t, and that I was ready to throw myself in the Seine if that would amuse her; and she commended my improvement in manners.  We had a drive, with a sympathetic coachman; and a wicked dinner in a suburb, which would have been quite harmless on American ground.  The child was as full of spirits as she had been the night she mounted the cabin chimney.  But I realized that more of my gold pieces were slipping away, and I had not seen Doctor Chantry.

“We were going to the mayor’s,” she maintained, when reproached.  “My father would have joined us if he had been there.  He would certainly have joined us if he had seen me alone with you.  Nothing is so easy as civil marriage under the Empire.  Of course the religious sacrament follows, when people want it, and if it is celebrated in the church of the Capuchins—­or any other church—­five minutes before midnight, it will make all Paris talk!  Every word I said was true!”

“But Doctor Chantry believed something entirely different.”

“You can’t do anything for the English,” said Annabel.  “Next week he will say haw-haw.”

Doctor Chantry could not be found when we returned to her father’s hotel.  She gave me her fingers to kiss in good-bye, and told me I was less doleful.