"Your voice is very sad," she said tenderly. Her nature, that knew every mood of a summer breeze, had caught the inflection of his words, understanding by their tone what the vagueness of his words hid from her mind.
"So many have died," he said, looking away from her. "Almost every day some one rides out into the sunlight to his death, young, brave, and smiling…. Mademoiselle, it is wonderful how they smile."
Tick—tick—tick.
For more than a minute neither spoke, then, with a smile that was strangely boyish, he squared his shoulders and ran his fingers through his rumpled hair.
"Ha!" he laughed; "what fancies get into a scatter-brain like mine when the rain's a-pattering on the roof. If you will allow me, little Pippa, I shall smoke."
"Little Peepa?" she laughed delightedly.
"Pippa," he assented, puffing smoke as he lighted the pipe. "I think I shall call you that. You see, according to her biographer, Mr. Browning, she worked in the silk-mills all the year, but one day she had to herself, from dawn to midnight, and so as to enjoy it to the full she—well, she pretended, like you."
"But that is droll," she said eagerly, "for every Easter after Sunday, my uncle, who is fatigued from so much chanting in the church, always goes to Boulogne and becomes drunk for one whole day. On Wednesday he returns. These six years he has done it always the same; and on the Tuesday it is wonderful. I am alone with Louis, and we ask all the people in our books to visit us."
A sudden gleam of excitement lit his eyes.
"The Tuesday after Easter?"