“Yes, mademoiselle,” he said slowly. “Yes.”
“You have been so good—you have done such wonders, that I rely upon you to help me;” and a sudden, sharp look of anxiety swept across her face. “We shall be good friends—n'est ce pas?” she said, turning to look at him as he stood near the door.
“It will be easy, I think, mademoiselle.”
Then he turned to Madame Senneville, who was carrying the baggage upstairs.
“It is his sister, Madame Senneville,” he said. “She will, of course, stay in the hotel.”
“Yes, and I have no room ready,” replied the huge woman, pessimistically. “One never knows what a summer storm may bring to one.”
“No, Mother Senneville, no; one never knows,” he said rather absently, and went out into the street. He was thinking of the strange young person upstairs, who was unlike any woman he had met or imagined. Those in her station in life whom he had seen during his short thirty years were mostly dressed-up dolls, to whom one made banal remarks without meaning. The rest were almost men, doing men's work, leading a man's life.
That same evening the injured man recovered consciousness, and it was the cure who sent off the telegram to the doctor at Fecamp. For the wire had been repaired with the practical rapidity with which they manage such affairs in France.
Through the slow recovery it was the cure who was ever at the beck and call of the two strangers, divining their desires, making quite easy a situation which otherwise might have been difficult enough. Not only the cure, but the whole village soon became quite reconciled to the hitherto unheard-of position assumed by this young girl, without a guardian or a chaperon, who lived a frank, fearless life among them, making every day terrible assaults upon that code of feminine behaviour which hedges Frenchwomen about like a wall.
In the intimacy of the sick-room the little priest soon learnt to talk with the Englishwoman and her brother quite freely, as man to man, as he had talked to his bosom friend by selection at St. Omer. And there was in his heart that ever-abiding wonder that a woman may thus be a companion to a man, sharing his thoughts, nay, divining them before he had shaped them in his own mind. It was all very wonderful and new to this little priest, who had walked, as it were, on one side of the street of life since boyhood without a thought of crossing the road.