Le Brun murmured something about obedience to her wishes; what, I did not hear. He evidently, however, did not like the scheme, and Gray saw it; but, in the general interest for Esther's tale, no one else did.
I do not give it here, for divers reasons. When she had done, it was found to be time to return. I would have left the party, but Raymond having seperated Le Brun from Esther, he joined himself to me, and I was unable to do so.
"What will Grace say?" thought I. "I hope she won't wait tea for me." I should have been somewhat crusty if, on an ordinary occasion, I had returned from a stroll and found that she and the rest had _not_ waited. Le Brun asked me--as M. Raymond had already done--to stay all the evening with the party. That, however, I felt to be impossible, and said so.
"Well, for the present, then," he said. "What can you tell me of M. Gray?" he added.
"I expect my brother here to-morrow," I said, "when I will compare notes with him. Till then I should be cautious, as I may injure an innocent man. But do you be cautious too. How about this challenge? Shall you sleep in the haunted house? It is romantic nonsense--this of a spirit, you know. Mademoiselle has seen a clothes-horse, or a--a part of her dress in moonlight. I don't believe in ghosts myself at all."
"Don't you?" said he, somewhat sadly. "I--the truth is, mon cher, I am afraid I do."
"You must go on now, though," I said, maliciously.
"Oh, yes--of course--go on," he answered; "but, monsieur----" he hesitated.
"I thought to ask a favor of you," he replied. "Will you accompany me to this house, monsieur? I feel I ask much--but will you?"
"Much, my very dear sir!" I exclaimed, in the fullness of my heart--"not at all too much. I shall be happy to be of any use to you, and will sit and smoke those cigars of yours, and let the ghosts go to old ----." I stopped suddenly.
"And what," thought I, "will Grace say to _that_?" A sort of dampness rushed out upon my skin; I had forgotten her. My sentence remained unfinished, and I looked eagerly about me, as if to question the adjoining shrubs as to what on earth I was to do. My dear Grace was the light of my eyes, and the joy of my heart, I'm sure; the best wife, the most amiable of the sex, but yet she had a kind of will of her own, which was apt to get grafted, as it were, upon mine. She never opposed me positively in any thing, but somehow, if she did not like it, it was rarely done. I had just promised what I might not be able to perform; and yet I did not like to confess to this foreigner that my wife led me. "A plague upon his Cubas and him too," I thought. Still, what was to be done?