“I came because of knowing about it, partly because of that and partly because grandfather had told me that I was to tell about it if it were to save a life. I thought and thought about it all winter. It seemed as though the spring would never come. I knew no one would dream of letting me come, of course, and I didn’t tell any one but Jean about what I was going to do. If you want me to I’ll go right on telling some more while we have the chocolate. There is so much to tell!”
Dian took off the red, brocaded cloth and brought out a white one from a shelf in a sort of small cavern in the wall. He spread it on the table. Marie Josephine jumped up, breaking off with, “I’ll set the table. I can talk while I’m doing it. Bring the silver, and the horn drinking cups, Jean. They’re there on the shelf. You see,” she looked across and smiled at Jean as she spoke, “I—I’ve been here in the hidden cellar before!”
Lisle was still sitting with his head thrown back against the stone wall, and as Marie Josephine looked over at him, a drinking cup in one hand and a silver spoon in the other, she noticed suddenly that his face was very white there in the candlelight and that there was something different about it. It was always like him to keep things to himself. She came across to him slowly.
“You have been always in my thoughts, and that is why I came—because of maman and of you. She is safe at Great-aunt Hortense’s house and Dian will take care of us, but there is something that makes you different. What is it?”
Dian brought a loaf of bread on a blue plate and put it on the table. He had already placed a dish of cheese by the jug of chocolate. Then lifting the table, he brought it up close to the chest.
“Come and eat and drink. That is the best for now. There is much to tell on each side, for you are not the only one who has had adventures, Little Mademoiselle,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I know; Rosanne. I am thinking all the time about it, how Humphrey Trail carried her through the snowstorm to that funny dark alley room.” She looked across uncertainly at Lisle. “There is something I do not know, something you have not told me,” she said slowly.
Lisle stood up and caught her about the waist.
“Come,” he said, “you are the worst little beggar as to looks I’ve ever beheld, isn’t she, Dian? But we’d rather have her just as she is than the greatest beauty in Paris as it was in the good old days!” He bowed before her as he spoke and, to his surprise, she started the first steps of the minuet. How she blessed those hours after dinner, practicing with Bertran! She hummed the melody as she danced and she forgot everything, even the hot chocolate for the moment. It was Lisle, with his same old half-laughing, half-serious way. She was dancing with him in the secret cellar and, of all the strange happenings of the past week, this seemed the strangest and in all ways the most wonderful.
“Sometime I’ll tell you about a mouse,” he said as they went through the graceful measures.