“Agreed!” he cried. “And for the sign, madame?”
She thought; and answered, with the grateful womanliness that redeemed her,—
“Do me a little service—something, anything—and I shall know it is you.”
The candles were burned half-way down in their bottles. He rose and one by one blew them out.
“Voilà!” he cried gaily. “To save your pocket!”
So the little scene ended.
“M. Gardel,” I said to him presently, “you come (you will pardon me) of the makers of the Revolution. I am curious to learn your experience of the premonitory symptoms of that disease to which at last you have fallen a victim.”
“Monsieur! ‘A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.’ It is an early remembrance with me how my father cursed me that I passed my eighth year, and so was liable to the salt-tax. My faith! I do not blame him. Things were hard enough. But it was unreasonable to beat me because I could not stop the march of Time. Yet we had not then learned to worship Reason.”
“The Moloch that devours her children!”
“So it appears. But there were signs and omens for long years before. I am of the territory of Berri, monsieur; and there all we learned to read was between the lines. I will tell you that I heard—for I was in service at the time” (he bowed with infinite complaisance to his Marquise)—“how, all during the chill, dark spring that preceded the September Massacres, Les laveuses de la nuit were busy at their washing.”