"Pierrot is in the garden."
"I did not know, and I had something to say to him."
"To him?" asked the young man suspiciously, and almost aggressively, "or to M. Giraud?"
Without appearing to notice her cousin's singular attitude towards her, she answered, in a docile way:
"To him, so that he might repeat it to M. Giraud, but as he was not there——"
"It is to Giraud that you have——"
"Given grandmamma's message. Yes," and then, with an innocent expression in her eyes, she asked: "Why does it interest you so much to know whether I gave this message to the one rather than to the other?"
He replied, in a joking tone, but with some embarrassment:
"Because I am inquisitive, probably; and the proof that I am inquisitive is that I should like to know what this message was."
"Grandmamma commissioned me to tell M. Giraud, who has no dress-coat——"