"Then please say that: '_On Sunday the book-stores are closed in
Paris._'"
"Is that what I am to say?"
"Exactly that."
"Very well, mademoiselle."
"Of course, if he asks who told you--you may say that it was a
Bretonne at Point Paradise."
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing, monsieur."
She courtesied and vanished.
"Little minx," I thought, "what mischief are you preparing now?" and
I rested my elbow on the window-sill and gazed out into the garden,
where apricot-trees and fig-trees lined the winding walks between beds
of old-fashioned herbs, anise, basil, caraway, mint, sage, and
saffron.
Sunlight lay warm on wall and gravel-path; scarlet apples hung aloft
on a few young trees; a pair of trim, wary magpies explored the
fig-trees, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes making common cause
against the shy wild-birds that twittered everywhere among the vines.
I fancied, after a few moments, that I heard the distant thudding of a
horse's hoofs; soon I was sure of it, and rose to my feet expectantly,
just as a flushed young girl in a riding-habit entered the room and
gave me her gloved hand.
Her fresh, breezy beauty astonished me; could this laughing, gray-eyed
girl with her silky, copper-tinted hair be the same slender, grave
young Countess whom I had known in Alsace--this incarnation of all
that is wholesome and sweet and winning in woman? What had become of
her mission and the soiled brethren of the proletariat? What had
happened?
I looked at her earnestly, scarcely understanding that she was saying
she was glad I had come, that she had waited for me, that she had
wanted to see me, that she had wished to tell me how deeply our tragic
experience at La Trappe and in Morsbronn had impressed her. She said
she had sent a letter to me in Paris which was returned, _opened_,
with a strange note from Monsieur Mornac. She had waited for some
word from me, here in Paradise, since September; "waited
impatiently," she added, and a slight frown bent her straight brows
for a moment--a moment only.
"But come out to my garden," she said, smiling, and stripping off her
little buff gauntlets. "There we will have tea a l'Anglaise, and
sunshine, and a long, long, satisfying talk; at least I will," she
added, laughing and coloring up; "for truly, Monsieur Scarlett, I do
not believe I have given you one second to open your lips."
Heaven knows I was perfectly content to watch her lips and listen to
the music of her happy, breathless voice without breaking the spell
with my own.
She led the way along a path under the apricots to a seat against a
sunny wall, a wall built of massive granite, deeply thatched with
fungus and lichens, where, palpitating in the hot sun, the tiny
lizards lay glittering, and the scarlet-banded nettle-butterflies
flitted and hovered and settled to sun themselves, wings a-droop.
Here in the sunshine the tea-rose perfume, mingling with the incense
of the sea, mounted to my head like the first flush of wine to a man
long fasting; or was it the enchantment of her youth and
loveliness--the subtle influence of physical vigor and spiritual
innocence on a tired, unstrung man?
"First of all," she said, impulsively, "I know your life--all of it
in minute particular. Are you astonished?"
"No, madame," I replied; "Mornac showed you my dossier."
"That is true," she said, with a troubled look of surprise.