"Oh, Archie!" Daisy exclaimed, as she opened the box and held to view a soft, rich, lustrous silk of dark navy-blue, which Lord Hardy had found in Nice, whither he had been that day, and which, in quality and style, did justice to his taste and generosity. "Oh, Archie, isn't it a beauty, and it almost stands alone?"
"Ye-es," Archie answered, meditatively, for he rather doubted the propriety of receiving so costly a present for his wife from a stranger, and he said so to Daisy, adding that it was of course very kind in Lord Hardy, but wholly uncalled for, and she'd better return it at once, as he would not quite like to see her wear it.
But Daisy began to cry, and said she had never had a silk dress in her life, and this was just what she wanted, and she could make it herself, and she presumed the amount Lord Hardy paid for it was no more to him than a few pence were to them. And so she kept it and thanked Lord Hardy very sweetly for it with tears swimming in her great blue eyes, when she met him in the evening at dinner, for he had given up his luxurious quarters at the more fashionable hotel, and had come to the same house with the McPhersons, whose shadow he became. The navy-blue silk was quickly made in the privacy of Daisy's apartment, and she was very charming in it, and attracted a great deal of attention, and drove the young Irishman nearly crazy with her smiles and coquetries. Lord Hardy took her and her husband to drive, every day, in the most stylish turn-out the place afforded, and took them to Nice and Mentone, and introduced them to some friends of his who were staying at the latter place, and of whose acquaintance, slight as it was, Daisy made capital ever after. The adventuress was developing fast in her, and Lord Hardy was her willing tool, always at her beck and nod, and going everywhere with her except into the play-room itself. From that place he was debarred, for at Monte Carlo they have decreed that no male under age shall enter the charmed spot, and Teddy was not twenty-one, and had said so to the man in the office, and after that neither persuasions nor bribes were of any avail.
"Better have lied straight out," more than one hard old man said to him, but Ted Hardy could not lie straight out, and so he staid out and waited around disconsolately for Daisy, whom fortune sometimes favored and sometimes deserted.