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1885.] woman. Did you expect me to do so?"

"But I'm not going to marry Mrs Markham, as it happens," he retorted angrily.

"Not – going – to – marry – Mrs – Markham!" This time Lady Frances got up – sprang up, rather – to her feet, then sat down again from sheer helpless bewilderment. "Not going to marry Mrs Markham! " she repeated, in a tone of abject astonishment. "Who then, Hal, are you going to marry?"

'I'm going – at least I'm engaged – to – to – to – to Madame Facchino."

"To Madame Facchino!"

She could only repeat his words and sit there, open-mouthed, helpless, mute. Had he said that he was engaged to be married to the Princess Vasarhely, or to Madame Bauche, her astonishment at the moment could hardly have been greater. To have all one's expectations, all one's apprehensions fixed upon one quarter, and then to receive a perfectly stunning knock-down blow from an opposite one! – it seemed to her for a moment as if everything were reeling and swimming around her.

"Yes, I thought you'd be a bit astonished!" the Colonel said, not without a certain satisfaction in that astonishment. "To tell you the truth, I'm a little astonished myself; I haven't got used to it, I suppose," he added ingenuously.

"But when? – how – how long has this been settled?" she said, recovering her voice at last with a violent effort. "It's not long since" – she stopped short – "since you seemed bent upon marrying another woman," she would have said, if she could have brought her lips to utter what would have sounded so like a taunt.

"Oh, not long – not above a week," he responded easily, yet with a certain undisguisable embarrassment.

"And is it – is it absolutely settled?"

"Settled ? Do you mean, can it be broken off? Well, I suppose it could, if you got her to see it in that light, which I don't suppose you could. You wouldn't propose my being the first to suggest it, would you? I thought you were one that had a prejudice in favour of one's keeping one's word!" – the Colonel was evidently trying to work himself up into a convenient condition of indignation.

"No, Hal, of course not – not if your word is promised," she replied despondently.

"Oh, it's promised fast enough. She wants to come and see you, to talk it all over with you, only she said I was to break it to you first. I believe she has rather an idea that you'd be against it – that you'd think she wasn't good enough – no money or anything of that sort, you know; and – well, perhaps, not exactly a Vere de Vere either – not that anybody thinks of that sort of thing nowadays. Look at old Skelmersgrass married his own cook the other day, and lots of young fellows have done worse, ever so much worse. No one can say that I've done anything of that sort, can they?"

His sister simply looked at him wondering, her whole soul swallowed up for the moment in her wonder. Was he talking like this from pure bravado? Or was it – could it be that it really was the way in which he looked at the matter, – that it affected him no more, no deeper than that?

"I suppose it was settled that day you came back in the steamboat?" she said at last – "the day, I mean, that we were all at San Francesco?"