"You can never have seen anything amiss in them," returned the innocent waif. "You may as well leave them alone, for they have never looked rudely at you and never will."
"I think," broke in at this moment the priest's servant, "that you might skip this part of the story. It is not very interesting to hear all the bad devices of this wicked woman, for ensnaring our waif."
"Put yourself at ease, Mother Monique," replied the hemp-dresser. "I shall skip as much as is proper. I know that I am speaking before young people, and I shall not say a word too much."
We were just speaking of François's eyes, the expression of which Sévère was trying to make less irreproachable than he had declared it to be.
"How old are you, François?" said she with more politeness, so as to let him understand that she was no longer going to treat him like a little boy.
"Oh, Heavens! I don't know exactly," answered the waif, beginning to perceive her clumsy advances. "I do not often amuse myself by reckoning my years."
"I heard that you were only seventeen," she resumed, "but I wager that you must be twenty, for you are tall, and will soon have a beard on your chin."
"It is all the same to me," said François, yawning.
"Take care! You are going too fast, my boy. There! I have just lost my purse!"
"The deuce you have!" said François, who had not as yet discovered how shy she was. "Then I suppose that you must get off and look for it, for it maybe of value."