Free Maggie MacKeever by Jessabelle

“that Michon refers to your sister’s impending marriage to Pennymount. That event will ally your family with me, I suppose, in a queer sort of way.”
    “I say!” said the Honorable Adolphus, delighted to discover the ice fairly broken at last. “I was wishing to talk to you about exactly that!” He cast a cautious glance at his host, wondering if he dared request privacy. Recalling the prodigious amount of money he owed Capitaine Chançard, Adolphus decided he dared not. “Did you bite Pennymount, Mme. Joliffe?”
    “ Bite him?” echoed Michon, with a wicked glance at his dear friend Jess, whose cheeks had turned pink. “Mon Dieu, chèrie! This you did not tell me.”
    Capitaine Chançard was in the confidence of Mme. Joliffe? Recalling the rumors about their relationship, Dolph decided he should not be surprised. Lest he cause a rift between them, he added hastily: “He was trying to strangle her, and naturally she had to defend herself.”
    “ Naturellement ,” murmured Capitaine Chançard.
    Gratified by so sympathetic an attitude, and from a gentleman who might be expected to display the exact opposite as result of monies due, Adolphus added confidently: “And I still say he’s a curst cold fish.”
    Two things, during this exchange, had come clear to Jess: first, that the Honorable Adolphus was no intellectual high-flyer; and secondly, that she must take immediate charge were any sense to be made from this exchange. “You wished to talk to me,” she pointed out, resolutely ignoring Michon’s ironic presence. “I give you leave to do so—but begin at the beginning, pray, and follow it straight through to the end!”
    Dolph tried very hard to follow this good advice. “Yes, but I don’t know what the beginning is!” he objected. “Milly says she wishes to marry Pennymount because he don’t dote on her, but I can’t think anyone would be refreshed by a betrothal to a fellow who’s always looking like he bit into something sour! I’ll tell you what it is, she’s cutting a wheedle, and though she vows she don’t, by whatever name she calls them she does!”
    The Honorable Adolphus was making a supreme effort to be coherent, Jess told herself, and therefore his failure must not be harshly judged. “What sort of a wheedle?” she persevered.
    “Dashed if I know!” Adolphus’s brow knitted in perplexity. “But I do know that if you’d been more biddable I wouldn’t be in this curst cleft stick! Milly says Pennymount means to marry her because she’s a biddable puss, which you wasn’t—and if you had been, then he wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t be caught between Scylla and whatever was the name of that other rock!”
    “Charybdis,” supplied Michon.
    “Biddable!” ejaculated Mme. Joliffe, a warm gleam in her eye. “Pennymount said that of me?”
    “Not Pennymount!” protested the Honorable Dolph. “Milly! But it’s no use crying over spilt milk. Milly is determined to make your acquaintance, Mme. Joliffe, and if I do not oblige her she will not oblige me by—” His gaze fell upon the nonchalant Capitaine Chançard. “—er! She’s taken some ridiculous notion that you may tell her how not to go about being divorced!”
    “In other words, your sister hopes to profit from my mistakes?” Jessabelle’s head had begun to ache.
    “I think so.” The Honorable Adolphus chewed on his lower lip. “Although she also said that Pennymount wouldn’t say why he wished to marry her and that it would serve him right if she did allow him to divorce her and thereby ruin his credit! Which don’t make any sense to me, because if she wished someone to toad-eat her she shouldn’t have set her cap at Pennymount in the first place. But there’s no sense to be made of the little minx.”
    Nor was that commodity much evidenced by the minx’s elder brother, as Capitaine Chançard and Mme. Joliffe both might have remarked. Jessabelle touched her fingertips to her throbbing temples and regarded