“Wise and learned!” he said, a little roughly, for his voice was husky with emotion. “‘Pon honour, I think I am a fool! A bewildered fool, that knows no more of woman than my cook knows Sanscrit. Faith, a hundred times less! For Mary Flynn’s got an eye to see, and, without telling, she knew I had a mind set on you. But Mary Flynn thought more than that, for she has an idea that you’ve a mind set on some one, Rosalie. She thought it might be me.”
“A woman is not so easily read as a man,” she replied, half smiling, but with her eyes turned to the street. A few people were gathering in front of the house—she wondered why.
“There is some one else—that is it, Rosalie. There is some one else. You shall tell me who it is. You shall—”
He stopped short, for there was a loud knocking at the shop-door, and the voice of M. Evanturel calling: “Rosalie! Rosalie! Rosalie! Ah, come quickly—ah, my Rosalie!”
Without a look at the Seigneur, Rosalie rushed into the shop and opened the front door. Her father was deathly pale, and was trembling violently.
“Rosalie, my bird,” he cried indignantly, “they’re saying you stole the cross from the church door.”
He was now wheeled inside the shop, and people gathered round, looking at him and Rosalie, some covertly, some as friends, some in a half-frightened way, as though strange things were about to happen.
“Shure, ‘tis a lie, or me name’s not Mary Flynn—the darlin’!” said the Seigneur’s cook, with blazing face. “Who makes this charge?” roared an angry voice. No one had seen the Seigneur enter from the little room beside the shop, and at the sound of the sharp voice the people fell back, for he was as free with his stick as his tongue.
“I do,” said the grocer, to whom Paulette Dubois had told her story.
“Ye shall be tarred and feathered before y’are a day older,” said Mary Flynn.