Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/357

1885.] this there could only be one reply, and the Colonel went.

"You'll see she'll never agree to anything of the sort, not if we were to offer her every penny we possess in the world, and ever so much more upon top of that," he said, with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, as he stood smoothing down his hat previous to departing upon his momentous errand. "It's me she wants, I tell you," he added, putting it upon his head with an air of desperation, not, however, unmingled with a certain jauntiness.

It appeared that he was right. What took place exactly upon that occasion Lady Frances never learnt, but apparently the Colonel's efforts to achieve his own deliverance had been of the feeblest. It was nearly one o'clock when he returned, and found his sister still sitting up waiting for him in the same chair as he had left her in three or four hours previously.

"Well?" she inquired anxiously, as he came into the room.

"Well what? There's nothing to say well about!"

"Do you mean that she won't give you up?"

"No, of course not. I always told you she wouldn't. Nobody in their senses would ever have imagined that she would!" he answered, seating himself in a chair, and stretching his feet out luxuriously before him.

"What did she say? What answer did she make to your letter? She must have made some answer."

"She didn't say much. There were some other fellows there, and there was some music, and the usual sort of thing going on, and she only said a word or two to me just as I was coming away. She is a deuced clever little woman, as I have told you before," Colonel Hal repeated, not without a certain prospective pride in so remarkable a phenomenon.

It was the last struggle of the captive for freedom! For a little while longer Lady Frances still cherished hopes of a different end to the drama, but in this she deceived herself; nay, oddly enough, the Colonel after this not merely resigned himself without another struggle to his destiny, but became almost cheerful and jocund over his prospects. As he could not effect his escape absolutely and without leaving a trace behind him, it seemed to him better, probably, to take the thing resignedly and comfortably, rather than to wear himself out with kicking against pricks which would never yield an inch to his efforts.

It seemed very unaccountable to his sister that one mood should follow so closely upon the heels of the other, but so it was, and she was obliged to recognise the fact. She could not help feeling, too, that there had been a certain degree of fatality in that joint piece of early rising upon the part both of herself and her brother. If they had only selected different days for their wakefulness, how different might the event have been! She did not quite go the length of wishing that it had been so, for that would have been immoral, but she sighed now and then as she reflected over it. The stars in their courses had certainly fought for Madame Facchino, since even her adversary's efforts had turned in the end so distinctly to her advantage. When, a few days later, the two ladies met, that astute little personage was as amiably alert and deferential as ever, showing no symptom whatsoever of any consciousness of what had recently taken place, the only difference in her manner being that it had certainly quite lost that slight touch of conscious culpability