"There!... Probably Monsieur will not find it; but all the better. It won't matter, even if he does not know it is there."
The Breton maid nodded. "A sachet à preservation then? I know them. We have them also, Mademoiselle. It is to avert all danger from the soldier who is to wear it, is it not?"
"No. Not precisely that," said the young Welsh girl. "It is to bring to him—well, Happiness of the best."
"Love, then. Ah, là là! I doubted myself of that!" declared the young bonne, bursting into ripples of laughter. "I go now to take the coat to Monsieur, who does not suspect. But no, Mademoiselle, I will say nothing to him of this; nothing, nothing, nothing at all!"
Olwen thought, as she went on: "Now Marie probably imagines that I am in love with this dreadfully uninteresting little Mr. Brown, and want to attract him to being in love with me! When I've never spoken to him in my life, or even seen what he's like when he's close to one!"
But that afternoon she both saw and spoke to this Mr. Brown.
They were returning, she and her Uncle, from one of those wanderings which the Professor loved to take out westwards from the hotel. For a couple of miles they had tramped along the hard sands at the foot of the great dunes wherein pine-trees were buried up to their lower boughs; then, leaving the sands, they had scrambled up the sandhills into the pine-forest that bordered them.
Its fragrant aisles stretched for miles bisected by paths, spread with a rich terra-cotta carpet of pine-needles. Already the Professor had slipped his pipe back into his pocket, for the notice "Défense à fumer" appeared again and again tacked up on the trunks of the great pines that made of those miles a perfect factory of turpentine.
With their faces towards home, they caught sight through the pines of a figure that repeated for an instant the effect of the pine-trunks themselves, brown-clad, long-lined, and slender. It stooped at the foot of a tree.
"My dear lady," said the Professor, taking off his hat to the figure, which was that of Mrs. Cartwright, "you look like Daphne, being changed into a pine rather than a laurel."