“Quite happy, Madame, thank you,” responded Lucienne, seating herself on the stool, and thinking that if the Marquise was referring to the 20th of June—and she could have meant nothing else—she had almost forgotten it already. “They are kindness itself—Sir William, and M. Georges, and Mademoiselle Amélie.”
“I am glad to hear you call my brother-in-law uncle,” remarked Madame de Château-Foix in a tone of approbation. “I hope the relationship will soon be a fact. And you have quite won his heart, Lucienne. Gilbert would be very pleased.”
At this juncture Mademoiselle d’Aucourt begged for all the news of Chantemerle, intimating that she had heard a good deal of Gilbert’s journey from Paris from the lips of Mr Trenchard. The Marquise complied copiously with this request.
“But,” she said, ending her account of the journey to Nantes with her son, and her embarkation, “you have forgotten to ask after our poor Louis. That is not kind of you, petite, after what you owe him.”
“What I owe him?” The girl turned up to the Marquise a very discomposed countenance.
Madame de Château-Foix gave a little amused laugh. “Don’t look so horrified, child. I am sure he was glad to do it. The English gentleman told you, I daresay, that he had met with an injury—Louis, I mean?”
“Yes,” said Lucienne breathlessly.
“Perhaps he did not tell you that—though Louis, of course, denies it—he saved Gilbert’s life in the affray they had at that place whose name I cannot remember. It seems that one of the dreadful men there had a knife which he would have plunged into Gilbert’s back if Louis had not thrown himself between just in time. . . . My dear child, what is the matter? The knife did not go into Gilbert’s back, though, of course, it is very terrible to think that it might have done so.”
But Lucienne, with her face hidden in the Marquise’s lap, made no answer. It was not Gilbert’s peril which had struck her speechless.