Читать книгу The Carolinian онлайн

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'Why...What is it?' quoth his lordship.

Captain Mandeville looked at Innes, disregarding the secretary's nod of greeting; then at the valet, busy with his lordship's hair.

'It will keep until Dumergue has finished.' His tone was now more normal. He sauntered across to the broad window standing open to a balcony wide and deep and pillared like a loggia. It overlooked the luxuriant garden and the broad creek at the end of it, whose waters sparkling in the morning sunshine showed here and there through the great magnolias that spread a canopy above them.

His lordship's glance followed the officer's tall, graceful figure in its coat of vivid scarlet with golden shoulder-knots and the sword thrust through the pocket, in compliance rather with the latest decree of fashion than with military regulations. His curiosity was aroused, and with it the uneasiness that invariably pervaded him where colonial matters were concerned.

'Innes,' he said, 'let Captain Mandeville read Lord Hillsborough's letter while he waits.' And he added the information that it had just arrived by the war sloop Cherokee and had been brought ashore an hour ago by her captain.