It will sometimes happen that young gentlemen, skipping confident, even under their lucky star, will get a fall. Fortune had been too constant to Jimmy not to be ready to turn her fickle face away the moment he wasn't looking. But such is the rashness born of success and a bounding heart, that young blood leaps to its doom, smiling, as it were, on the faithless lady's back.
Jimmy had no forebodings, but rioted gorgeously in returning health, in a whole pack of new emotions, and in what he supposed to be his lady's favor. Aleck, more philosophical, took his happiness with a more quiet gusto, not provoking the frown of the gods. But for Jim the day of reckoning was coming.
One day Aleck joined him, walking up and down the porch. Jim was in one of his boyish, cocksure moods.
"I know what you're going to say," he began, before Aleck could spring his news. "You're going to marry the princess."
"Just so," said Aleck. "How'd you know? Clairvoyance?"
"Well, you needn't look so high and mighty about it, old man. Why don't you do the same thing yourself? Then we'll have a double wedding."
As the two men talked, Agatha and Mélanie, both dressed in white, strolled side by side down the garden path toward the wall. They were deep in conversation, their backs turned toward the veranda.
"I don't see that they look so much alike," announced Jim, who had but recently learned all the causes and effects of the Chatelard business. Aleck's eyes gleamed.
"Which one, as they stand there now, do you take to be Miss Redmond?" he asked.
"One on the left," answered Jim promptly.
Aleck gave a signaling whistle which caused both the women quickly to turn. Agatha was on the right.
Aleck grinned broadly. "So that Yahoo of a Frenchman wasn't so stupid after all."
"I'd like to get my hands on him!" muttered Jim.
"Frenchman or not, there's going to be a wedding right here in the old red house on Wednesday," said Aleck.
"And then Mélanie and I are going to cruise back to New York. Awfully sorry--but you're not invited."
"You couldn't get me aboard any gilt-edged yacht that floats!"
At Jimmy's words--wholly untrue, by the way--Aleck's happy mood suddenly dimmed, as he thought of the dangers and anxieties of the past month. He turned and laid an arm, boy-fashion, over Jim's shoulder, pulling his hair as his hand went by.