"But surely you can remember what the incident was?" persisted Aymar. "Come, now!" and he threw a pear on to the book, while the unwary Laurent, thankful at least to have got the volume out of the enquirer's hands, cudgelled his brains desperately. At last inspiration leapt into them.
"This is what I meant. Don't you remember, somewhere near the beginning, where his daughter falls into a torrent—not a salmon river, though—and is rescued by a stranger who plunges in?" He turned feverishly in search of the episode and read it, and encouraged, by his escape, looked up at his friend with a meaning smile and added, "We are told a little earlier that 'the stranger's conversation, which was at once pleasing and instructive, induced me to wish for a continuance of it.'" Then he closed the dangerous volume firmly, returned it to his own pocket and dropped his head again upon his arms on the warm grass.
"The sun is getting round," observed Aymar presently. "No, I am all right. I like it on my feet. Come and lean up here; you will be out of it then."
So Laurent dragged himself nearer and rested his back against the side of the chair. Aymar amused himself by gently pulling his hair.
"Tiens," said Laurent with a little yawn, "that is what Maman used to do to send me to sleep when I was small. It generally did; if not, she would tell me a fairy story. Tell me one!" His head dropped on to Aymar's knee.
The hand left his hair, and there was silence.
"If I told you a story, Laurent," came L'Oiseleur's voice at last, "it would not be a fairy story. Nor do I think it would send you to sleep." And, after a longer pause still, he added, so low that Laurent barely heard it, "No, not to-day."
But Laurent was already carrying the words with him into a land of dreams where they interpreted themselves as something quite different.
(7)
But even as misfortune pursued the Reverend Dr. Primrose, pressing on him a fresh calamity in every chapter, so with Dr. Primrose's readers. The day of peace to which they were both looking forward when Aymar was next morning installed again under the pear tree was rudely broken by the advent of a letter to Mme Allard from Jérôme, her elder son, announcing his immediate return, ill. And Jérôme, there was no possibility of doubt, would instantly denounce Laurent's presence to the garrison at Arbelles.