The breeze had loosened a strand of her hair, and she put it back before she replied, turning to him with a half-smile, "I am afraid that Grain d'Orge—I should say Sancho Panza—would not approve."
"True," responded La Vireville, but before he had time to suggest a means of getting round this difficulty, Henri du Coudrais appeared up the sandy path.
"Come, Raymonde," he said, "we should be off." To M. de la Vireville he had already made his grateful adieux, and seeing that gentleman's evident desire to escape any further testimonies of gratitude he did not repeat them now.
But for her leave-taking Raymonde de Guéfontaine waited till her brother had run down the slope once more.
"I forbid you to stand up!" she said to the Chouan, and, slipping to her knees beside him, she held out her hand. When, however, he thought to carry it to his lips, she seized his right hand strongly in both of hers and pressed her own lips upon it. "I wish André had known you!" she murmured, with something that sounded like a sob. Then she got up and ran down the sandy path.
And the Chevalier de la Vireville was left in some stupefaction, staring after her and then at his just-saluted hand. . . . After a moment he got to his knees and made a grab for the trailing bridle of his horse, now deriving a hasty nourishment from the coarse grass, intending by this means to support himself on one foot. In clutching at the reins—the grey naturally moving on precisely at the moment of capture—his hand, that hand which had recently been so unexpectedly hallowed, came into contact with something prickly. It was a young plant of sea-holly.
"Peste!" ejaculated the sufferer, but he caught the bridle and scrambled to his feet—or foot. Once again he looked curiously at his right hand. But the tingling sensation which was running over it now was not due entirely to its contact with a woman's lips. There was a little blood on it, for the sharp, bloomless sea-holly had scratched him. Blood on his hand and a kiss; the sea-holly's wound and a woman kneeling beside him by the sea—these things were all to come back to him afterwards. . . . Now he stood with his arm over the saddle, and watched the embarkation.
"I am glad the witch has gone," observed Grain d'Orge with simple thankfulness as he in his turn came up the slope. "She has caused a great deal of trouble. Are you ready, Monsieur Augustin, to start for Carhoët?"
Monsieur Augustin came out of his momentary reverie. "Quite ready," he replied. "Turn the animal round. I must mount on the wrong side as before with your kind assistance. By the way, Grain d'Orge, do you know what this creature's name is?"