“But you are going away too,” the boy rejoined, quite angry with himself because his voice was husky.
“Not till after the New Year. Then I am going to Avignon.”
“Avignon?”
“To school at the Ladies of the Visitation,” she explained, and added quaintly: “I am very ignorant, you know, Tan-tan.”
He frowned and she thought that he was cross because she had called him Tan-tan.
“By the time you come back,” she said meekly, “I shall be quite used to calling you M. le Comte.”
“Don’t be stupid, Nicolette,” was all that Bertrand could think of saying.
They were both silent after that, and as Nicolette turned to climb up the gradient, Bertrand followed her, half reluctantly. He knew she was going to the hut of Paul et Virginie: the place they were wont to call their island home. It was just an old, a very old olive tree, with a huge, hollow trunk, in which they, as children, could easily find shelter, and in the spring the ground around it was gay with buttercups and daisies; and bunches of vivid blue gentian and lavender and broom nestled against the great grey boulders. Here Bertrand and Nicolette had been in the habit of sitting when they pretended to be Paul et Virginie cast off on a desert island, and here they would eat the food which “Paul” had found at peril of his life, and which “Virginie” had cooked with such marvellous ingenuity. They had been so happy there, so often. The wood-pigeons would come and pick up the crumbs after they had finished eating, and now and then, when they sat very, very still, a hare would dart out from behind a great big boulder, and peep out at them with large frightened eyes, his long ears sharply silhouetted against the sun-kissed earth, and at the slightest motion from them, or wilful clapping of their hands, it would dart away again, leaving Bertrand morose and fretful because, though he was a big man, he was not yet allowed to have a gun.
“When I am a man,” was the burden of his sighing, and Nicolette would have much ado to bring the smile back into his eyes.
They had been so happy—so often. The flowers were their friends, the wild pansy with its quizzical wee face, the daisy with the secrets, which its petals plucked off one by one, revealed, the lavender which had to be carried home in huge bunches for Margaï to put in muslin bags. All but the gentian. Nicolette never liked the gentian, though its petals were of such a lovely, heavenly blue. But whenever Bertrand spied one he would pluck it, and stick it into his buttonhole: “The eyes of my Rixende,” he would say, “will be bluer than this.” Fortunately there was not much gentian growing on the island of Paul et Virginie.