"No, no ... I was only wishing there were a birch tree here too."
"We could easily find one and put it there," said the boy, at once sympathetic.
Horatia smiled through the mist in her eyes. "There is something I should like almost better—a big screen such as I used to have at the foot of my bed, all covered over with pictures from children's books."
"But that we could make," suggested the practical Claude-Edmond.
"Why, of course we could!" exclaimed his aunt, struck with the idea. "Claude, you are a genius! There are plenty of screens in the house.... We will do it up here, secretly, just we two—if you like, Claude."
"If I like!" exclaimed the boy, enraptured.
And that was why the mistress of the house often spent so much time in reposing herself in the afternoon, and why Emmanuel sometimes sought his son in vain at the same hour. Both absented might have been found, surrounded by litter and paste, playing at being children again in the nursery.
Even Madame de Vigerie did not share their secret, for her great house was now so full of guests that the informal intercourse of the early summer was impossible, though visits of ceremony were exchanged on both sides. Life at Kerfontaine was however less unsociable than in the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon, for in the evening all the inmates gathered round the domestic hearth, playing bouts-rimés, cards or loto, or doing fancy-work. On one such evening in mid-June all the company was thus assembled in the salon: the Duchesse, Mme. de Léridant, Emmanuel and M. de Beaulieu were playing cards, Claude-Edmond was deep in a book, while Horatia and the Marquise de Beaulieu, the one embroidering, the other painting on gauze, were listening to the gallantries of a superannuated beau of the neighbourhood, who had been dining with them, when suddenly the Vicomtesse de Vigerie was announced.
She came in looking, for the first time, to Horatia's eyes, almost beautiful, and having the effect of being at once pale and flushed, breathless and collected. Horatia hurried to greet her, and Armand to relieve her of the cloak about her shoulders.
"I have news," said she, "news of the greatest importance. You have not heard? ... I thought that perhaps M. le Duc... Let me pay my respects first to the Duchesse." Smiling, excited, she curtsied to that venerable dame, and then said, like a herald, "The Regent has left England for Italy!"