“A mouse! What do you mean?” she questioned merrily, smiling over her shoulder at Dian and Jean.
“And a cake!” he went on.
“A cake! What do you mean?” she exclaimed again.
“Come, please, and have the very nice chocolate,” pleaded Jean, and they both came running up to the table.
It was a strange supper there in the deep dim cavern in the heart of the earth. Lisle and Jean brought the bed up to the table, and they sat down on it, opposite Dian and Marie Josephine. The hot chocolate in the old horn drinking cups was delicious, and it seemed to the two wayfarers that they had never tasted anything so good as the bread and cheese.
“Tell me what you mean by a mouse and a cake, Lisle,” Marie Josephine demanded, but her brother shook his head.
“I’m too hungry just now, and I want to know what happened when you found that Jean had followed you. That’s where you left off in your story,” he said.
Dian had told Marie Josephine that the good Yorkshire farmer had saved Rosanne from men who had tried to abduct her. He had told her at once that Lisle was safe in the hidden cellar and that her mother was in the house of Great-aunt Hortense, but more than this she did not know. She had taken for granted, in her fatigue and excitement, that her mother was quite safe, being in the house of her great-aunt, and as Lisle sat before her alive and well she could not but see that it was all right with him.
“When I knew that Jean had really come, had followed me all the way, I was so glad! I can’t tell you how I felt, but it was like flying. We ran on and on through the woods, and we did not seem to be tired at all. We would rest now and then, and once I told a story, but I didn’t dare to stay still for very long, for fear Jean would fall asleep.”
Jean blushed at this, and Marie Josephine added hastily: