“Are you tired, chérie?” asked Tante Modeste kindly.
“No, thank you,” she replied, with a soft sigh. “I was thinking of papa, and Sunflower, and the ranch, and dear mama. Oh, I wonder if she’ll come back soon.”
Tante Modeste made no reply, but she fell to thinking too. There was something strange about it all that she couldn’t understand.
The child’s remarks and Madame Jozain’s stories did not agree. There was a mystery, and she meant to get at the bottom of it by some means. And when Tante Modeste set out to accomplish a thing she usually succeeded.
CHAPTER XII
TANTE MODESTE’S SUSPICIONS
“Paichoux,” said Tante Modeste to her husband, that same night, before the tired dairyman went to bed, “I’ve been thinking of something all the evening.”
“Vraiment! I’m surprised,” returned Paichoux facetiously; “I didn’t know you ever wasted time thinking.”
“I don’t usually,” went on Tante Modeste, ignoring her husband’s little attempt at pleasantry; “but really, papa, this thing is running through my head constantly. It’s about that little girl of Madame Jozain’s; there’s something wrong about the ménage there. That child is no more a Jozain than I am. A Jozain, indeed!—she’s a little aristocrat, if ever there was one, a born little lady.”
“Perhaps she’s a Bergeron,” suggested Paichoux, with a quizzical smile. “Madame prides herself on being a Bergeron, and the Bergerons are fairly decent people. Old Bergeron, the baker, was an honest man.”
“That may be; but she isn’t a Bergeron, either. That child is different, you can see it. Look at her beside our young ones. Why, she’s a swan among geese.”