"But I have got it back," confessed Aymar, "and it is mended, and I am wearing it at this moment. It is at your service."
"Mended, eh?" said d'Andigné. "Magically, no doubt?"
Aymar suddenly wheeled round and put his hand on Laurent's shoulder. "Yes, magically," he said. "He mended it . . . like a good many other things."
His smile pretty well finished Laurent.
To cover his confusion he went out to the steps. His appearance was the signal for a burst of cheering which very quickly drove him in again. The crowd was much larger and more expectant than he had realized. He clutched Aymar, just turning away from du Tremblay, by the arm. "Can you hear them?" he asked. "In England, you know, we should take the horses out and drag the carriage. I wonder if MM. de Fresne and Perrelet are game?"
"I am," observed the little doctor gaily, but Aymar, beginning to move rather unwillingly towards the door, observed that for nothing on earth would he trust himself behind Laurent as a horse in his present frame of mind. "You might take the bit between your teeth and bolt again," he added with a meaning smile. And he put a hand on the culprit's shoulder and gave him a little shake. "I don't believe you are an atom penitent, either. And what was so unpardonable, Laurent, was the inexactitude! I had told you so many times that it was not red-hot!"
Laurent choked back a queer sound. "Aymar, you really are impayable! . . . What's the matter?"
Aymar had caught sight of the crowd. "Must I go through that? I would rather face the ramrod again."
"I'm afraid you must," said Laurent, and seeing that de Fresne and M. Perrelet and du Tremblay were close behind L'Oiseleur, he darted down the steps to open the carriage door. So, without meaning to, but with delight, he saw the picture he should unendingly possess for his own—Aymar coming down the steps after his ordeal, neither triumphant nor abashed, but just his own quiet and gallant self.
He had so much eyes only for that descending figure in its beautiful and unconscious perfection of poise, that it was not till afterwards that there came to him out of memory the stored scraps he had heard from the populace as he waited there—among people who wanted to shake hands with him, too, which rather bored him. "He would not tell—he saved M. du Tremblay—that's M. du Tremblay himself—they say he was actually tortured—how pale he looks—I knew a man who was with him in the Moulin Brûlé——" and the only other actual visual impression he retained, that of a middle-aged Breton with a firelock slung across his goatskin, reverently removing his broad-brimmed hat as Aymar passed—the Chouan who had spat at him yesterday.