I could not understand her eyes, which were averted with something like a smile.
"It is one of the best situated houses in England," I answered, unguardedly, and Madame laughed outright.
"My friend," she said, "one reason why I like you is that you are not at all clever. This house is yours, and you are offering Lucille and me a home in our time of trouble—and I accept."
She laid her hand, as light as a leaf, on my shoulder, and when I looked up she was gone.
On the morning of Saturday, September 3d, I received a note from John Turner.
"If you have not gone—go!" he wrote.
Our departure had been fixed for a later date, but the yacht of an English friend had been lying in the port of Fécamp at my disposal for some days. We embarked there the same evening, having taken train at the St. Lazare station within two hours of the receipt of John Turner's warning. The streets of Paris, as we drove through them, were singularly quiet, and men passing their friends on the pavement nodded in silence, without exchanging other greeting. Hope seemed at last to have folded her wings and fled from the bright city. Some indefinable knowledge of coming catastrophe hovered over all.
It was a quiet sunset that clothed sea and sky with a golden splendour as we steamed out of Fécamp harbour that evening. I walked on the deck of the trim yacht with its captain until a late hour, and looked my last on the white cliffs and headlands of the doomed land about midnight—the hour at which the news was spreading over France, as black, swift and terrible as night itself, that hope was dead, that the whole army had been captured at Sedan, and the Emperor himself made prisoner. All this, however, we did not learn until we landed in England, although I have no doubt that John Turner knew it when he gave us so sharp a warning.
The weather was favourable to us, and the ladies came on deck the next morning in a calm sea as we sped past the North Foreland between the Goodwin Lightships and the land. It was a lovely morning, and the sea all stripes of deep blue and green, and even yellow where the great sand banks of the Thames estuary lay beneath the rippled surface.
Lucille thought but little of England, as she judged it from the tame bluffs of Thanet.