“If you mean Nancy Oakes, I’ve heard that one. But he’s not French, Jack. He’s Mauritian. And he isn’t really a count, not by English standards. What he is”—and here I removed the slim wooden stick with which I’d been stirring my ice, and pointed it toward Jack’s round, pink, overheated face—“is thirty-two years old, and already divorced.” I sipped my drink. “Other than that, he’s a nice enough fellow.”

“Her parents ain’t too happy.”

“Well, of course they’re not happy. Nancy’s just fresh out of school, you know, this nice French boarding school in New York City that’s supposed to keep the foxes from poaching its darling baby bunnies. And now he’s apparently whisked her off all the way to Florida on their honeymoon, while Lady Oakes sits and stews in Bar Harbor.”

Jack whistled softly. “Florida? I didn’t hear that.”

“Oh, I have my own sources. All up in arms too. If there’s one thing rich folks everywhere can unite against, it’s a fortune hunter.”

As I spoke, Jack’s eyes flickered to the left, the passageway to the hotel lobby. It was just past four o’clock in the afternoon, and now that the British Colonial Hotel’s former cadre of American tourists had been replaced—thanks to Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt—by the employees of the Pleasantville Construction Company of New Jersey, building out two airfields for the use of the newly combined Allied forces, Nassau’s favorite watering hole was largely empty. Just the usual old fellow at his usual old table, reading his usual old newspaper, and a couple of gents chattering confidentially in the corner, and yours truly, recuperating from her Red Cross morning. The doorway lay behind me, so I couldn’t see the newcomer. Jack’s gaze returned to me.

“Fortune hunter?” he said. “If you say so.”

“I didn’t say so. I’m just telling you what others are saying.”

“For one thing, he ain’t exactly broke, Fred de Marigny.”

“He’s not exactly Sir Harry Oakes, either.”

“And for another thing, he ain’t the type.”

“You don’t figure?”

“Likes the ladies too much to marry one for nothing but cold hard cash, if you ask me.”

I peered at my thumbnail, pressed against the glass. “I guess I can believe that.”