“Pray be quiet, and I will give you a shilling to buy a cake.”
“No, you won’t,” said Patty. “Yes, I will indeed,” I said, “if you will be a good girl, and go to sleep.”
“Give it me now, then,” said the stupid thing. And I did give her one, and if she did not actually take it, though I believe she was quite as old as Clara or I; but all the while so dreadfully childish, anyone, from her ways, would have taken her for nine or ten—that is, if they could have shut their eyes to her size. However, at last she fell asleep, and we sat waiting for the trysting-hour, “Do you know,” said Clara, in a whisper, “I begin to get tired of spoiling one’s night’s rest for the sake of meeting them. It was all very well at first, but it’s only the same thing over and over again. I know all about beautiful Italy now, and its lakes and vineyards, and the old tyrant Austrian days, and the Pope, and patriotism, and prisons, and all that sort of thing; while he seems to like to talk about that more than about you know what, and one can’t help getting a little too much of it sometimes.”
“Oh, for shame, Clara!” I said; “how can you talk so? It is not loyal. What would some one say if he knew?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t—”
“Oh, hush! you sha’n’t say so,” I exclaimed; “for you do care—you know you do.”
And then I sat silent and thinking for some time; for it was as though something began to ask me whether I also was not a little tired of hearing about “ma patrie” and “la belle France” and whether I liked a man any the better for being a patriot, and mixed up with plots for restoring the Orleans family, and who made a vow to spit—cracher—on Gambetta’s grave.
I should not have thought anything of the kind if it had not been for those words of Clara, and I soon crushed it down; for I was not going to harbour any such cruel, faithless thoughts as that I had told Achille again and again that I loved him very dearly; and of course I did, and there was an end of it. But still, though I bit my lips very hard, and tried not to think of such things, it did seem tiresome, I must own, to have to sit up waiting so long; and, like Clara, I did begin to long for a change. If we could have met pleasantly by day, or had a quiet evening walk, and all on like that, it would have been different; but, after the first flush of the excitement and romance, it began to grow a little tame.
“Heigh—ho!—ha!—hum!” said Clara, interrupting my reverie by a terrible yawn, so that had it been daylight I’m sure any one might have seen down her throat, for she never attempted to put her hand before her mouth.
But I could not tell her of it; since I had only the minute before been yawning so terribly myself that I was quite ashamed. For really there seemed to be so little romance about it.