"You must really need a strong head, Monsieur de la Rocheterie, not to believe, after all, in the efficacy of yours! Tell me, if I am not impertinent, whether there is not some one action which will break its power if you happen to do it? In most fairy tales it is so."
"I believe," said the young leader, wrapping himself up again, "that there is some dark story in the past history of this object or its predecessors, but I do not know what moral it is supposed to point. Apart from that—Morbleu, what an extraordinary thing! It has just happened to me, and I never gave it a thought!"
"What is it?" asked Laurent eagerly.
"I must never cross running water, except by a bridge, or on horseback, or by some means of that sort. I must never go through it in person. And, to do myself justice—and again in deference to those Chouans of mine—I never have . . . until to-day. But you cannot deny that I have crossed it this morning—water of the most running!"
And he looked at his fellow-adventurer in running water with unfeigned amusement.
(5)
As Laurent de Courtomer tied his stock that evening in his own bedroom, he was both thoughtful and excited. To fall into the river and narrowly escape drowning, to have a total stranger risk his life for him over it, to discover that the stranger in question was someone he knew about and admired, and, finally, to possess him at the moment as a guest under his own roof—these were sufficient reasons why the stock should be well tied . . . and sufficient excuse for the fact that it was not.
Nor had Laurent quite shaken off the shyness which had unexpectedly descended upon him when he was driving home from the Three Trouts with L'Oiseleur beside him—that sudden hot conviction that he, with nothing to his credit, had been chattering too freely to this young hero. Had or had not M. de la Rocheterie seemed a little remote, a little withdrawn, during that drive?
A knock at the door, interrupting these cogitations, heralded the entrance of Mme de Courtomer, looking charming but pale. Laurent's heart smote him as he turned round from the dressing-table. She kissed him long and closely; she had not yet got over her emotion.
"I am just going down to the drawing-room, my darling," she said. "I hope M. de la Rocheterie may be there; I want to see him alone. When you brought him to me in the garden I was, I fear, rather selfishly absorbed in thoughts of you and your danger."