De Launay reflected that one might well call her a fairy. In many primitive places that combination would have won her the name of having the evil eye. In a kinder land it gave her gentler graces. "Are you satisfied, monsieur?" asked Solange, with a sneer. As he nodded, soberly, she dropped the veil and restored her cap. The people in the café had looked on with respectful and yet eager curiosity, a murmur of affectionate comment running about the tables. "I'm quite satisfied," he repeated again, as he tossed a note on the table to satisfy his account. Solange's mouth curled scornfully as she noted again the stack of saucers indicating his habits. "I'm going to marry Morgan _la fée_, the Queen of Avalon, and I'm going to enlist in her service to do her bidding, even to unlicensed butchery where necessary. Mademoiselle, lead on!" Solange led on, but her head was high and her face expressed an extreme disdain for the mercenary who had signed on with her. CHAPTER V A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE De Launay expressed himself as quite willing to look after most of the details of the affair, and Solange, although capable, being more or less ignorant, was willing to leave them to him, although with some misgiving. The sight of that stack of saucers in the café of the Pink Kitten remained to haunt her with distaste for the whole adventure. She distrusted De Launay, recalling some of the more lurid tales she had heard of his exploits. In spite of everything, he had been a légionnaire, and légionnaires could hardly be purified even in the fires of war. Before he arrived at her apartment to go with her to the _mairie_ of that _arrondissement_, she was to suffer further misgiving. Ahead of him arrived a gorgeous bouquet of lilies of the valley and orange blossoms, and they were not artificial flowers, either. When he arrived, looking much more respectable than she had expected, his mustache even twisted jauntily and his clothes pressed to neatness, she met him with accusation. "Is it monsieur that I have to thank for--these?" she indicated the flowers with expressive and disdainful hands. De Launay stared at them vacantly as he stood in the door. "I suppose it must have been," he said, meekly. "I am forgetful, mademoiselle. You must make allowances for a broken soldier if my--vagaries--occasionally offend you." "It is in bad taste, to say the least, to bedeck the bride in such a ceremony," she said cuttingly. "If I must hire a husband, he need not, at least, forget decency and make me conspicuous. Remember that." "The flowers," said De Launay, "are as if they had never been. I dismiss them from the earth. With another drink or two I will cease to recall that such things as flowers exist. Mademoiselle will command me!"