Jeanne and Isabelle turned their eyes on her penetratingly. She held them energetically at bay, hardening her gaze, defying them.
"I didn't see you have any rose yesterday," said Jeanne. But Marise knew by the tone of her voice that she was not sure.
"Well, I did," she repeated, "Gabrielle Meunier gave it to me out of her bouquet. Oh, I'm so sorry it's spoiled."
"I believe you, that it's spoiled," said Isabelle carelessly, dropping it into the dustpan. "Somebody must have stepped on it to crush it like that."
Her interest in it was gone. She began to hum her favorite dance-tune, "jig-jig, pr-r-rt!" and to shake out a rug.
Marise fled down the slippery waxed stairway, three steps at a time, and dashed out on the street, Jeanne, purple-faced and panting, close at her heels. How she hurried, how breathlessly she hurried that morning; but a thought inside her head doggedly kept pace with her hurry.
CHAPTER XIX
I
Now that she was in an advanced class, she stayed all day in the school and convent, taking her lunch with the "internats" in the refectory. So that it was always six o'clock before Jeanne came for her, with the first, thin twilight beginning to fall bluely in the narrow, dark streets, and sunset colors glimmering from the oily surface of the Adour. That evening when Jeanne came for her, she said that Maman had decided to go back for a day or two to Saint Sauveur for the sake of the change of air and to try the baths again. Jeanne never permitted herself the slightest overt criticism of her mistress in talking to Marise, but she had a whole gamut of intonations and inflections which Marise understood perfectly and hated—hated especially because there was nothing there to quarrel with Jeanne about. Jeanne had told her the news in the most correct and colorless words, but what she had really said was, "Just another of her idle notions, gadding off for more sulphur baths. Nothing in the world the matter with her. And it's much too early for the Saint Sauveur season."