Mrs. Gregory stared over the parapet at the harbor. “I wonder if anybody has visited that steam yacht?”
“The Hermana?” I said. “She’s waiting, I believe, for her owner, who is enjoying himself very much on land.” It was a strong temptation to add, “enjoying himself with the cat,” but I resisted it.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Possibly a friend of yours?”
“Even his name is unknown to me. But I gather that he may be coming to Kings Port--to attend Mr. John Mayrant’s wedding next Wednesday week.”
I hadn’t gathered this; but one is at times driven to improvising. I wished so much to know if Juno was right about the engagement being broken, and I looked hard at the ladies as my words fairly grazed the “cat.” This time I expected them to consult each other’s expressions, and such, indeed, was their immediate proceeding.
“The Wednesday following, you mean,” Mrs. Weguelin corrected.
Mrs. Gregory spoke this time. “General Rieppe. Less well again, it seems.”
It would be like Juno to magnify a delay into a rupture. Then I had a hilarious thought, which I instantly put to the ladies. “If the poor General were to die completely, would the wedding be postponed completely?”
“There would not be the slightest chance of that,” Mrs. Gregory declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular: “She’s coming at once to see for herself.”
To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so far employed at all: “There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an automobile.”
My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was reported to be travelling.
“Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile,” said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.
Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory’s announcement. The oracles, moreover, continued.