"Monsieur," she said then; "will you just let me slip in front of you? I am so little; I shan't stop your seeing."
She had a nice voice. The poise of her head, lifted and thrown back on a plump neck, showed a pair of bright eyes and good teeth between pouting lips. She glided, merry and alert, into the place Jean made for her without a word.
The man with the guitar sang a ballad about caged birds and blossoms in flower-pots.
"Mine," observed the work-girl to Jean, "are carnations, and I have birds too—canaries they are."
At the moment he was thinking of some fair-faced châtelaine roaming under the battlements of a donjon.
The work-girl went on:
"I have a pair,—you understand, to keep each other company. Two is a nice number, don't you think so?"
He marched off with his visions under the old trees of the Avenue. After a turn or two up and down, he espied the little work-girl hanging on the arm of a handsome young fellow, fashionably dressed, wearing a heavy gold watch-chain. Her admirer was catching her by the waist in the dusk of the trees, and she was laughing.
Then Jean Servien felt sorry he had scorned her advances.