"Nevertheless you shall measure monsieur. Have you the tapes? Good: give me one, with the blue chalk, and I will check off your measurements."
She seated herself on the gun-carriage and drew the two tunics on to her lap. John shivered as she touched the dead sergeant's.
Félicité grinned as she advanced with the tape. "Do not be shy of me, monsieur," she encouraged him affably. "You are a hero, and I myself am the mother of eight, which is in its way heroic. There should be a good understanding between us. Raise your arms a little, pray, while I take first of all the measure of your chest."
Her two arms—and they were plump, not to say brawny—went about him. "Thirty-eight," she announced, after examining the tape. It's long since I have embraced one so slight."
"Thirty-eight," repeated Mademoiselle Diane, puckering up her lips and beginning to measure off the pouces across the breast and back of Sergeant Barboux's tunic. "Thirty-eight, did you say?"
"Thirty-eight, mademoiselle. We must remember that these brave defenders of ours sometimes pad themselves a little; it will be nothing amiss if you allow for forty. Eh, monsieur?" Félicité laughed up in John's face. "But you find some difficulty, mademoiselle. Can I help you?"
"I thank you—it is all right," Diane answered hurriedly.
"Waist, twenty-nine," Félicité continued. "One might even say twenty-eight, only monsieur is drawing in his breath."
"Where are the scissors, Félicité?" demanded her mistress, who had carefully smuggled them beneath her skirt as she sat.
"The scissors? Of a certainty now I brought them—but the sight of that heathen Ojibway, when he gave me the tunic, was enough to make any decent woman faint! I shook like an aspen, if you will credit me, all the way across the drill-ground, and perhaps the scissors… no, indeed, I cannot find them… but if mademoiselle will excuse me while I run back for another pair.…" She bustled off towards the Commandant's quarters.