About nine o'clock we were summoned by a Breton maid to the pretty
breakfast-room below, and I was ashamed to go with my shabby clothes,
bandaged head, and face the color of clay.
The young countess was not present; Sylvia Elven offered us a
supercilious welcome to a breakfast the counterpart of which I had not
seen in years--one of those American breakfasts which even we, since
the Paris Exposition, are beginning to discard for the simpler French
breakfast of coffee and rolls.
"This is all in your honor," observed Sylvia, turning up her nose at
the array of poached eggs, fragrant sausages, crisp potatoes, piles of
buttered toast, muffins, marmalade, and fruit.
"It was very kind of you to think of it," said Speed.
"It is Madame de Vassart's idea, not mine," she observed, looking
across the table at me. "Will the gentleman with nine lives have
coffee or chocolate?"
The fruit consisted of grapes and those winy Breton cider-apples from
Bannalec. We began with these in decorous silence.
Speed ventured a few comments on the cultivation of fruit, of which he
knew nothing; neither he nor his subject was encouraged.
Presently, however, Sylvia glanced up at him with a malicious smile,
saying: "I notice that you have been in the foreign division of the
Imperial Military Police, monsieur."
"Why do you think so?" asked Speed, calmly.
"When you seated yourself in your chair," said Sylvia, "you made a
gesture with your left hand as though to unhook the sabre--which was
not there."
Speed laughed. "But why the police? I might have been in the cavalry,
mademoiselle; for that matter, I might have been an officer in any arm
of the service. They all carry swords or sabres."
"But only the military police and the gendarmerie wear aiguilettes,"
she replied. "When you bend over your plate your fingers are ever
unconsciously searching for those swinging, gold-tipped cords--to keep
them out of your coffee-cup, monsieur."
The muscles in Speed's lean, bronzed cheeks tightened; he looked at
her keenly.
"Might I not have been in the gendarmerie?" he asked. "How do you
know I was not?"
"Does the gendarmerie wear the sabre-tache?"
"No, mademoiselle, but--"
"Do the military police?"
"No--that is, the foreign division did, when it existed."
"You are sitting, monsieur," she said, placidly, "with your left
foot so far under the table that it quite inadvertently presses my
shoe-tip."
Speed withdrew his leg with a jerk, asking pardon.
"It is a habit perfectly pardonable in a man who is careful that his
spur shall not scratch or tear a patent-leather sabre-tache," she
said.