“No. Only a matter of form, I think. Being an émigré and Mirabel confiscated—he can neither prevent nor forward such an attempt.”
Mlle de la Vergne was silent, pushing at the gravel with a little shoe and looking down at it. “Where is Mirabel, did you say?”
“Quite near Paris, I gather,” replied Artamène.
“I wish,” said Marthe pensively, “that I were in Paris—quite near Mirabel!”
“My dear little sister, what would be the good of that?” asked Artamène, amused.
“I have relatives in Paris,” announced Roland, with sudden and apparent irrelevance, “two old cousins of my father’s—quiet, unsuspected, unsuspicious old gentlemen.”
The little silence which followed this statement was broken by a whirr of wings as one of Marthe’s pigeons alighted on the gravel outside the arbour, and, looking hard and hopefully at them out of one round, red-circled, unemotional eye, began to walk slowly up and down, jerking its burnished neck.
“O, if I were only a man!” exclaimed Mlle de la Vergne, abruptly, springing to her feet with kindling eyes.
“If I only had two arms!” said her brother, following her example, but more slowly.
“But I am a man, and both my arms are sound!” cried Roland, almost brandishing those members.