“Mon pauvre enfant!” she murmured, as she half closed her eyes, and kissed the tips of her fingers. “But wait a while, Henri, mon enfant, and all shall be well.”
There was a lapse of time devoted to thought, and then Aunt Marguerite’s eyes glistened with malice, as she saw Madelaine approach.
“Pah!” she ejaculated softly. “This might be Amsterdam or the Boompjes. Wretched Dutch wench! How can George tolerate her presence here!”
Then Pradelle came back, but he did not look up this time, merely went to the door and entered, his eyes looking searchingly about as if in search of Louise.
Lastly, a couple of particularly unseamanlike men, dressed in shiny tarpaulin hats and pea-jackets, with earrings and very smooth pomatumy hair, came into sight. Each man carried a pack and a big stick, and as they drew near their eyes wandered over window and door in a particularly searching way.
They did not come to the front, but in a slouching, furtive way went past the front of the house and round to the back, where the next minute there was a low tapping made by the knob of a stick on a door, and soon after a buzzing murmur of voices arose.
Aunt Marguerite had nothing whatever to do, and the murmur interested her to the extent of making her rise, go across her room, and through a door at the back into her bed-chamber, where an open lattice window had a chair beneath, and the said window being just over the back entrance from whence the murmur came, Aunt Marguerite had nothing to do but go and sit down there unseen, and hear every word that was said.
“Yes,” said the familiar voice of brown-faced, black-haired Liza; “they’re beautiful, but I haven’t got the money.”
“That there red ribbon ’d just soot you, my lass,” said a deep voice, so fuzzy that it must have come from under a woollen jacket.
“Just look at that there hankychy, too,” said another deep voice. “Did you ever see a better match?”