As he watched Cecilia leave he said to himself, “She’s mad as a hatter--or is it just Boston?”
About a week after he met Lord Frothingham at Mrs. Staunton’s, Edward Allerton left his bank an hour before luncheon time and went to the Public Library. His look as he entered was undoubtedly furtive; and as he drifted aimlessly round the reading-room, declining the offers of assistance from the polite and willing attendants, his manner was such that had he been a stranger he would have been watched as a suspicious character. He took several reference books from the cases, finally and most carelessly of all, a Burke’s Peerage. Half concealing it with his overcoat, he bore it to a table and seated himself. He turned the pages to where “Frothingham” appeared in large letters. There he stopped and read--at first nervously, soon with an attention that shut out his surroundings:
Frothingham--George Arthur Granby Delafere Gordon-Beauvais, seventh earl of Frothingham, Baron de Beauvais, b. at Beauvais House, Surrey, March 9, 1865, s. of Herbert Delafere Gordon-Beauvais, sixth earl of F., and Maria Barstow, 2nd dau. of the Marquess of Radbourne. Succeeded on the death of his father, Aug. 4, 1890.
Allerton studied the coat of arms, which originated, in part, in the tenth century, so Burke said. He read on and on through the description of the secondary titles and other honours of his sister-in-law’s guest, into the two columns of small type which set forth the history of the Gordon-Beauvais family--its far origin, Godfrey de Beauvais, a great lord in the time of Charlemagne, so Burke declared; its many and curious vicissitudes of fortune, its calamities in old France through the encroachments of the Dukes of Burgundy, which finally drove it, in poverty, but with undiminished pride and unabated resolution to live only by the sword and the tax-gatherer, to England in the wake of William the Conqueror; its restoration there, and long and glorious lordship, so glorious that it scorned the titles a mere Tudor, or Stuart, or German nobody could give until 1761, when it condescended to receive from George III the Earldom of Frothingham. There were places in the narrative so weak that even the adroit and sympathetic Burke could not wholly cover them. But the Milk Street banker saw them not. No child ever swallowed a tale of gnomes and fairies and magic vanishings and apparitions with a mind more set upon being fooled. He read slowly to prolong the pleasing tale. And when he came to the end he read it through again, and found it all too short.