“Think of it! Well, I never; and you really lived in France. Of course you speak the French language fluently. They say the French are so excitable. Cora Spink ought to know. She lived a whole month right in Paris, among the French. She said they pull and haul you about so.”
The smile he had been able to repress for the last few minutes got the better of him. He grinned.
“I never found them so,” he confessed quietly. “They’re the kindest and calmest people in the world.”
“S’pose you’ve seen everything,” she affirmed, edging, to Lamont’s intense relief, toward the door. “The guillotine, and the Opera House, and where Napoleon is buried.”
Her small, pudgy hand hesitated on the big, white-china knob, while she added:
“How well I remember my father’s engravings of these. They hung in the hall of our ancestral mansion in North Carolina. Mr. Snyder, an artist neighbor of ours, told my father—I remember so well—it was just after he became judge—that they were quite valuable. Father was a great admirer of the French. I recall him now going down into the cellar himself to decanter some old French brandy we had, the finest, they used to say, in the State of North Carolina, Mr. Lamont—as they always said,” she declared proudly, “what the judge didn’t have under his roof, no other North Carolinian did. Now I must be going. That little girl’s ears are tingling, I know, to hear more about your wonderful discoveries. Good-by—or, rather, au revoir I should say, shouldn’t I?”
She waved her hand lightly toward them both.
“Au revoir, madame,” he returned, with a low bow.
The door with the china knob closed. She was gone, her step growing fainter down the stairs, and when at last she opened that half of the front door bearing Fortune hugging her sheaf of wheat, closed it with a click, and had stepped over the whirling dust and two circulars of a dentist celebrated for his cheap prices, and had made her way safely down the stoop, and Sue, with her back to her precious Chippendale table, started to break the awkward silence that had followed her mother’s departure, Lamont stretched out both hands to her pleadingly.
“Come!” he exclaimed, softly. “Let us have a good talk. I have so much to say to you. Won’t you sit there?” he entreated, nodding to the sofa.