"Do I understand you're proposing to take her from Kerry to London and back again from London to Clare in five, four days?" He was silent. "What does _she_ say, Jim?"
"Refuses point-blank," he answered despairingly.
I walked over to the writing table and took out a telegraph form.
"The simplest thing is to put Raney off for the present," I said.
He made no answer, but, when my tea was brought me next morning, there was a pencilled note lying on the tray, "Thanks, old man.--L."
It was a clear victory for Sonia, but she was sufficiently shame-faced for the remainder of the visit to make me think she was getting little pleasure out of her triumph. From time to time my mother asked me why they did not advance the date of the wedding, but, according to Sonia, a mischievous fairy seemed to be playing tricks with the calendar. For a marriage in Advent Jim would require dispensation; Lady Loring always had to spend the early months of the year abroad; "and his old Pope would excommunicate him," Sonia told me, "if he tried to have the wedding in Lent. And then it would be May, and then some other Royalty would go and die...."
Until my conversation with her I had in my ignorance never appreciated how strongly the position of the celibate was entrenched.
O'Rane arrived at the end of the following week and asked whether Jim and Sonia were still with me.
"So that was the reason of your wire," he observed, when I told him they had left on the Wednesday. "Which was it?" I asked him whether he had had a good crossing. "Oh, well, I know it wasn't Jim," he said. "'Nous devons adorer Dieu, mon fils, mais c'est un grand mystère de sa providence qu'il ait crée la femme.'"
"Perhaps Jim is thinking that at this moment," I said, and the subject was dropped.
O'Rane's visit gave me my first opportunity of following up the Mexican adventure from the point at which "Mr. James Morris" had left it. The company, I found, had been launched successfully, if not quite at Morris's optimistic valuation; the mysterious new concession--"about the size of Scotland"--was promising well, though the working expenses were unexpectedly heavy. I gathered that the partnership was drawing a profit of 15,000 dollars a year, or, in English money, about fifteen hundred pounds for each partner.