'Yes, indeed.'
'You tell him, then,' said Marie, nodding her head as she crept away.
Nidderdale had been observing her while she had been talking to Miss Carbury. He had heard the rumour, and of course felt that it behoved him to be on his guard more specially than any one else. But he had not believed what he had heard. That men should be thoroughly immoral, that they should gamble, get drunk, run into debt, and make love to other men's wives, was to him a matter of everyday life. Nothing of that kind shocked him at all. But he was not as yet quite old enough to believe in swindling. It had been impossible to convince him that Miles Grendall had cheated at cards, and the idea that Mr Melmotte had forged was as improbable and shocking to him as that an officer should run away in battle. Common soldiers, he thought, might do that sort of thing. He had almost fallen in love with Marie when he saw her last, and was inclined to feel the more kindly to her now because of the hard things that were being said about her father. And yet he knew that he must be careful. If 'he came a cropper' in this matter, it would be such an awful cropper! 'How do you like the party?' he said to Marie.
'I don't like it at all, my lord. How do you like it?'
'Very much, indeed. I think the Emperor is the greatest fun I ever saw. Prince Frederic,'--one of the German princes who was staying at the time among his English cousins,--'Prince Frederic says that he's stuffed with hay, and that he's made up fresh every morning at a shop in the Haymarket.'
'I've seen him talk.'
'He opens his mouth, of course. There is machinery as well as hay. I think he's the grandest old buffer out, and I'm awfully glad that I've dined with him. I couldn't make out whether he really put anything to eat into his jolly old mouth.'
'Of course he did.'
'Have you been thinking about what we were talking about the other day?'
'No, my lord,--I haven't thought about it since. Why should I?'
'Well;--it's a sort of thing that people do think about, you know.'
'You don't think about it.'
'Don't I? I've been thinking about nothing else the last three months.'
'You've been thinking whether you'd get married or not.'
'That's what I mean,' said Lord Nidderdale.
'It isn't what I mean, then.'