"Then it mustn't be!" she declared brightly. "For it is my idea, and if you are not pleased with it, it is I who will be terribly disappointed. It is just a little while ago that father and I arranged the plans. We are to go to-morrow direct to Paris, and as soon as we get there—now listen very attentively, Jean!—we are going to pick out an atelier for you and fit it up. And you are not to come until we send you word that everything is ready. And the day you arrive I shall be hostess at the studio at a reception to which all Paris will be invited. Everybody that is worth while will come, and your entrée will be a triumph. Now, Jean, will that not be splendid?"
She was smiling at him, vivacious, flushed with excitement. Splendid—yes, it would be splendid! An entrée to Paris like that! It was the first tangible glimpse of reality out of the chaotic blaze of luring, golden dreams.
"It—it is too good of mademoiselle!" he stammered excitedly.
Low, musical, her laugh rippled through the room again, as she looked at him. The man was magnificent—the head, the shoulders, the splendid strength, the mobile, changing lights and shadows in his face like a child who had not yet learned to mask its emotions, and all this coupled with the deliciously picturesque background of the discovery of his art, would make him the rage in Paris. Paris would literally go wild over him! And she? Well, he would be still more a new sensation than ever—and perhaps, who knew?—but the man was too easily aroused—and then there was the possibility that her father, that Bidelot and the others had overrated him, that he would be but the phenomenon of the moment, only to sink after a while into uninteresting mediocrity—she would see. But for the present at least Paris would echo and re-echo with the name of Jean Laparde. Her eyebrows arched demurely, innocently. There was something else she had to say to Jean. She had never spoken to him of Marie-Louise—naturally. But she must speak now. Marie-Louise, a peasant girl, a bare-footed fisherwoman, in Paris as Jean's fiancée was perfectly impossible!
"Jean," she said ingenuously, "you know we took the cottage without much formality as far as any definite length of time was concerned. Of course we expected to stay longer, and if all this had not happened we certainly should have done so. So, do you think, when we speak to Marie-Louise about going, that she would be perfectly satisfied with a month's rent? I told father I would ask you."
Jean's face clouded.
"You have not told Marie-Louise then that you are going to-morrow?" he asked slowly.
"How could we—when we did not know ourselves until a little while ago?" she answered.
"No; that is so," he said. Then, with a short, conscious laugh: "I have not spoken to Marie-Louise myself."
"Of course you haven't!" she returned quickly, "And you have been wise."