“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” replied Marie, looking at his face with a close scrutiny, as if it were familiar to her.
“And that is all that I had to tell you, Madame Marie,” concluded Barebone.
And, strangely enough, Marie smiled at him as he turned away, not unkindly.
“To you, mademoiselle,” he went on, turning again to Juliette, whose hand was at her hair, for she had been taken by surprise, “my message is simpler. Monsieur, your father, will be glad to have your society at Bordeaux, while he stays there, if that is true which the Gironde pilot told him—of fever at Saintes, and the hurried dispersal of the schools.”
“It is true enough, monsieur,” answered Juliette, in her low-pitched voice of the south, and with a light of anticipation in her eye; for it was dull enough at Gemosac, all alone in this empty château. “But how am I to reach Bordeaux?”
“Your father did not specify the route or method. He seemed to leave that to you, mademoiselle. He seemed to have an entire faith in your judgment, and that is why I was so surprised when I saw you. I thought—well, I figured to myself that you were older, you understand.”
He broke off with a laugh and a deprecatory gesture of the hand, as if he had more in his mind but did not want to put it into words. His meaning was clear enough in his eyes, but Juliette was fresh from a convent-school, where they seek earnestly to teach a woman not to be a woman.
“One may be young, and still have understanding, monsieur,” she said, with the composed little smile on her demure lips, which must only have been the composure of complete innocence: almost a monopoly of children, though some women move through life without losing it.
“Yes,” answered Loo, looking into her eyes. “So it appears. So, how will you go to Bordeaux? How does one go from Gemosac to Bordeaux?”