"I must go back to the house now. There is nothing more to be done, I suppose--nothing left now but to wait for night to come. I shall see Arthur this afternoon and make one last appeal to him. If that fails you must carry him off. Do you know where he sleeps? It is the room corresponding to yours on the other side of the house--just across that wide landing at the top of the stairs. I will manage that the front door below shall be left unlocked. The rest you and your friends must do. If I can make any impression upon Arthur I'll slip a note under your door this afternoon or this evening. Perhaps, even if he decides to go, it would be best for him to wait until night and go with the rest of you. In any case, I'll let you know."
She spoke rapidly, as if she were in great haste to be gone, and with averted eyes. And at the end she turned away without any word of farewell, but Ste. Marie started after her. He cried:
"Coira! Coira!" And when she stopped, he said: "Coira, I can't let you go like this! Are we to--simply to go our different ways like this, as if we'd never met at all?"
"What else?" said the girl.
And there was no answer to that. Their separate ways were determined for them--marked plain to see.
"But afterward!" he cried. "Afterward--after we have got the boy back to his home! What then?"
"Perhaps," she said, "he will return to me." She spoke without any show of feeling. "Perhaps he will return. If not--well, I don't know. I expect my father and I will just go on as we've always gone. We're used to it, you know."
After that she nodded to him and once more turned away. Her face may have been a very little pale, but, as before, it betrayed no feeling of any sort. So she went up under the trees to the house, and Ste. Marie watched her with strained and burning eyes.
When, half an hour later, he followed, he came unexpectedly upon the old Michel, who had entered the park through the little wooden door in the wall, and was on his way round to the kitchen with sundry parcels of supplies. He spoke a civil "Bon jour, Monsieur," and Ste. Marie stopped him. They were out of sight from the windows. Ste. Marie withdrew from his pocket one of the hundred-franc notes, and the single, beadlike eye of the ancient gnome fixed upon it and seemed to shiver with a fascinated delight.
"A hundred francs!" said Ste. Marie, unnecessarily, and the old man licked his withered lips. The tempter said: "My good Michel, would you care to receive this trifling sum--a hundred francs?"