It said curtly, with concise eloquence:—
"I want you. I can live without you no longer."
The opportunity presented itself in this wise. Though cut off from all other pleasures of youth, Leonie was, at midsummer, for the short six weeks' season, allowed to bathe in the sea, attended by the faithful Valentine. She crossed daily to St Malo on the "Pont Roulant"—a quaint structure that, moved by chains and steam, plies the water on sand-embedded rails—and there joined in the acquatic gambols of the merry crowd. With the strange inconsistency of the narrow, her relatives, who had almost tabooed society, permitted her to indulge her taste for swimming, a sport in which she excelled. This laxity probably owed its origin to routine cultivated in the girl's childhood, and retained—as were all the observances of Madame's distinguished household—still intact and unchallenged.
At St Malo, as the tide ebbed, all the delightfully insouciant and cheery French world congregated. The sands near the giant rock that marks the ideal resting-place of Chateaubriand were dotted with tents—a perfect army of mushrooms—which served as disrobing shelters for the bathers. From these emerged a brilliant throng of masqueraders of both sexes, who tripped to the tide with varying degrees of elegant assurance. As Leonie's lithe figure, with its natty tunic and cherry waist-band, slipped from the tent (Valentine for the moment was arranging the shed raiment) a gamin with bare limbs and furled shrimping net lurched up against her. There was unusual audacity in the eye of the youngster, but the disrespect was forgiven when a missive, crunched in his plump palm, was transferred to hers.
She clasped her hands, drew a long breath of rapturous surprise, and devoutly whispered:—
"Que Dieu soit beni!"
The Catholic and Breton temperament is so finely interwoven that even this sudden overstepping of family restrictions had to her its pious side. She could there and then, in effervescent thankfulness, have knelt to worship all the infinitesimal saintlings of whom her lover had never heard, but who, with her, were active pioneers to mercy. Besides this, love, which, when real, touches the religious string in every breast, had so long played an accompaniment to prayer and worship, that her first action was almost mechanically devotional. Her second, in contrast, was crudely mundane. Valentine, complacency beaming from her triple chins, loomed expansively in the doorway of the tent, so Leonie, slipping the billet in her mouth, sped for protection to the ocean, the only haven where she could be free from company and espionage.
She battled against the waves till she neared the protective raft in deep water where timorous bathers never ventured. Then she hoisted herself up, took the scrap of paper from its hiding place, and re-read it, crossing herself devoutly and crying with childish exultation:—
"Oh sea, beloved sea, you have brought him to me at last! Never, never shall he depart but with Leonie!"
As she declaimed, a man's head appeared above the arch of the waves, and on the instant they recognised each other.