While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d’Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying: "Give me one!—I’ve forgotten mine! ..." "Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met: "You’re hurt! But now you know—you’re sorry for me, aren’t you?" It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot’s voice. "Frightfully! All the more because"—Franky drew so hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly—"I can’t help being thundering—glad!" "I—see! ..." She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate, saying desperately: "Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I’ve got to say?" She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier’s with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from _Samson et Dalila_ on the terrace of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play. "It’s got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879—tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos—but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn’t have accepted it. And, naturally enough—I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I’ve absquatulated, just as the kiddy’ll want one when his own time comes." Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green: "Would it matter so very much if there wasn’t any boy?" Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.