“But I had not your permission to write to you.”
Denise laughed gaily.
“So far as that goes you had not my permission to order me out of my own house; to send a steamer to St. Florent to fetch me; to treat me as if I were a regiment, in a word—and yet you did it, monsieur.”
Lory sat up in his desire to defend himself, winced and lay down again.
“I fancy it is your Corsican blood,” said Denise, reflectively. She rose and re-arranged a very sporting dustcloth which the baroness had laid across the wounded man's legs, and which his movement had cast to one side. “However, it remains for me to thank you,” she said, and did not sit down again.
“It may have been badly done, mademoiselle,” he said earnestly, “but I still think that it was the wisest thing to do.”
“And still you give me no reasons,” she said without turning to look at him. She was standing at the edge of the verandah, looking thoughtfully out at the matchless view. For the house stood above the pines which lay like a dusky green carpet between it and the Mediterranean. “And I am not going to ask you for them,” she added with an odd little smile, not devoid of that deep wisdom with which it is to be presumed women are born; for they have it when it is most useful to them, and at an age when their masculine contemporaries are singularly ignorant of human nature.
“I am going,” she said after a pause. “Jane told me that I must not tire you.”
“Then stay,” he said. “It is only when you are not there that I find it tiring.”
She did not answer, and did not move until a servant came noiselessly from the house and approached Lory.