"Oh, child, you could not be so silly!"
"No, Pani. And I shall be glad to have him go away. I do not want any lovers."
The woman was utterly amazed, and then consoled herself with the thought that it was merely child's play. They both lapsed into silence again. But Jeanne's thoughts ran on. There was Louis Marsac. What if he returned next summer and tormented her? A perplexing mood, half pride, half disgust, filled her, and a serious elation at her own power which thrills young feminine things when they first discover it; as well as the shrinking into a new self-appropriation that thrusts out all such matters. But she did not laugh over Louis Marsac. She felt afraid of him, and she scrubbed her mouth where he had once kissed it.
There was another kiss on her hand. She held it up in the firelight. Ah, if she had a father like M. St. Armand, and a brother like the young man!
She was seized with an awful pang as if a swift, dark current was bearing her away from every one but Pani. Why had her father and mother been wrenched out of her life? She had seen a plant or a young shrub swept out of its rightful place and tossed to and fro until some stronger wave threw it upon the sandy edge, to droop and die. Was she like that? Where had she been torn from? She had been thrown into Pani's lap. She had never minded the little jeers before when the children had called her a wild Indian. Was she nobody's child?
She had an impulse to jump about and storm around the room, to drag some secret out of Pani, to grasp the world in her small hands and compel it to disclose its knowledge. She looked steadily into the red fire and her heart seemed bursting with the breath that could not find an outlet.
The bells began to ring again. "Come," "come," they said. Had she better not go to the sisters and live with them? The Church would be father and mother.
She bent down her head and cried very softly, for it seemed as if all joy had gone out of her life. Pani fell asleep and snored.
But the next morning the world was lovelier than ever with the new fallen snow. Men were shoveling it away from doorways and stamping it down in the streets with their great boots, the soles being wooden and the legs of fur. And they snowballed each other. The children joined and rolled in the snow. Now and then a daring young fellow caught a demoiselle and rubbed roses into her cheeks.
All the rest of the week was given over to holiday life. There were great doings at the Citadel and in some of the grand houses. There were dances and dinners, and weddings so brilliant that Marie De Ber's was only a little rushlight in comparison.