“Really?” He smiled. “I haven’t discovered it. We have those four years, your mother and I, four years of your childhood to make up. We have been cheated out of them, and we cannot consider you grown up till we have been paid back those lost years.”
“Oh, papa!” Lucie looked quite taken aback.
“Four years,” he repeated, laughing and pinching her cheek.
A week later appeared Victor. The meeting between the older and the younger soldier was good to see. For the time being Lucie felt herself a person of small consequence. Victor was absorbed in her father, he in Victor. After the first half hour Lucie slipped away. She was not grown up; no one considered her so. Even her old playmate treated her like the child she felt herself to be. She threw something around her and went out into the garden, now winter-locked. She looked back to see if Pom Pom were following, but he was all too content to be within reach of Victor’s hand, within sound of his voice. She sighed as she looked at the broken wall separating her own garden from that which was now a wilderness. Those good old days! No more Annette; no more those lightsome hours of play.
The kitchen door was open. She heard Paulette and Odette talking inside. “He will marry Mlle. Annette, Madame Gaspard, I should say,” she heard Paulette’s voice.
“I do not believe it,” answered Odette.
“And why not?” Paulette asked. “Of course one must give them time, but it is plain to every one that it would be the best arrangement.”
“I do not think those two will ever marry,” Odette maintained.
“One gives you credit for much good sense, my daughter,” laughed Paulette, “but you are too young to know everything. I say the thing will be accomplished and I am not the only one who thinks so.”
Lucie gave a little impatient kick at a bit of stone in her path, and waited to hear no more, but went on to visit the rabbits. She felt very lonely. She had few girl acquaintances in the town and those she had known were now far away, safely sheltered in some convent school. Why was every one so bent upon talking about Annette and Victor? and why had Victor just now greeted her in that slightly embarrassed, slightly distant manner? Heretofore he had always been so cordial, so unconsciously natural. What was it that made the difference? It must be as Paulette surmised.