Marise remembered Danielle, the mocking, and glanced uneasily towards where the Garniers stood, waiting for her to go on with them. No, Danielle had not heard. Jeanne was safe.
Marise had grown so that she no longer needed to reach up to put her arms around the neck of the tall old woman, and kiss her hard on both tear-wet cheeks. "I owe my victory to thee, dear Jeanne, to thy prayers," she whispered fervently. "And I shall never, never forget it."
All this was a lie, of course, but lies were easy to tell, and what harm were they, if you made somebody more comfortable by telling them?
She pirouetted about on her toes, and ran back to take her place with Mme. Garnier. "Jeanne had bad news from one of her family," she murmured pensively in answer to Mme. Garnier's look of inquiry. "Oh, bah!" she thought carelessly. "What was one more lie to head off an old cat like that?" Besides, it was amusing to see how easy it was to lie, how with one little phrase, this way or that, you could change facts.
After she had come in, and gone to her room to change to her usual dark woolen school-dress, with the long-sleeved linen apron over it, Marise happened to glance out through the lace curtain over her window and saw that Mme. Garnier's son was sitting on the bench across the street in front of the Château Vieux. "Well, that was queer, why hadn't he gone on with his mother and Danielle?" She looked again, to make sure, herself hidden at one side behind the heavy tapestry curtain, as Jeanne had taught her, lest she be seen by men on the street. "Yes, it was Danielle's brother, sure enough. Well, what could he be doing there?"
She turned back to her greenish mirror to take off the white ribbon from her hair, and found that she had a dim recollection that before he went away to America, he used to sit on that bench in the late afternoon and evening. There was something unpleasant connected with that vague memory, and after a time that came to her also. She had heard Anna Etchergary, the concierge, and Jeanne laughing about it, and had overheard them conjecture that the young man was no such innocent mother's boy as he seemed, and then they had seen that Marise was there, and stopped abruptly, looking at her with the expression that she hated.
Before she went in to dinner, she looked out once more to see if he were still there. Yes, there he was leaning forward, the light from the street-lamp full on his face. Marise could see that he was pale, but there was a smile on his lips as if his thoughts were very pleasant.
When she stepped into the salon, she did not for a moment see that Maman was already there, because she stood at one side of the window, half hidden in the thick tapestry curtain, looking out through the lace over the glass. By the expression of her back, Marise knew that she, too, was looking at Mme. Garnier's son on the bench. For an instant, as though Marise's fingers had dropped on white-hot metal, the wild idea came to her that it was at Maman that Jean-Pierre was smiling, that it was for Maman that he sat there. She jerked herself away angrily and instantaneously from this thought, ashamed of herself. She was getting like Jeanne, like the girls at school.
Maman had heard her move, and now turned sharply around from the window, with the startled look of some one into whose bed-room you've walked without knocking at the door. But Marise never knocked at the salon door before going in. Why should she have thought of it to-day? Maman drew the heavy curtain over the window with a sweep of her bare white arm. For Maman was in grande tenue with her mauve satin low-necked evening dress on, and a camellia in her hair. Marise's first thought was that she was to have another solitary dinner. "Oh, Maman, are you going out?"
"Certainly not, what makes you think I am?" asked Maman quickly. She added because it was perfectly evident what made Marise think it, "The belt on this dress has been changed and I tried it on to see if it was right. And then I saw it was dinner time."