Marie raged, but that unlucky language difficulty hampered her freedom of speech.
"Madame Gilbert is not so very great," she got out at length. "She is my mistress, because she is rich, and because she saved me when I was in trouble in France. She is just an ordinary widow, not a real lady like I should be if you married me, Willie."
"What is that?" cried Willatopy, starting up. "Madame Gilbert a widow? She told me she had a big handsome husband who loved her very much. She told me so when I said that I would like to marry her. I was a boy then, and had not become Lord Topsham."
"Madame Gilbert is not truthful—like me. She says any old thing which suits her at the moment. Sometimes she tells men that she has a husband, sometimes that she is a widow. She is really a widow, I swear it to you. Her husband was killed in the war."
"How do you know?" asked Willatopy suspiciously. "I would believe Madame before you. She is a Queen, not a common thing like you. She cannot be a widow."
"She is," stated Marie positively, and left the assertion to sink into Willatopy's mind. She was horribly jealous of the boy's honest devotion to Madame Gilbert, and knew that widows were held in scant respect in the Torres Straits. Willie ranked his mother, once the wife of a white god, as altogether different from the ordinary run of brown widows, but she had been, so far, the one exception permitted by his social code. The simple savage mind does not like exceptions.
"No," said he at last. "I am sure that Madame has a big, handsome husband as she declared to me."
"No," shouted Marie.
"Marie," growled Willatopy, "I don't want to smack you, but if you say anything against Madame, I shall, hard."
"You love Madame better than you do me," grumbled Marie.