"In that event why appeal to Mr. Tollemache?"
"Oh, I see your difficulty now. When aroused Lorry is a very convincing person indeed. He would tell Mr. Fosdyke to 'quit,'—that is exactly what he would say,—and if Mr. Fosdyke didn't quit he'd jolly well make him—which is also what Lorry would say."
Mrs. Carmac seemed to consider the point for a few seconds. "My difficulties, as you put it, cover a larger area," she said, with a bitterness that had its pathetic side. "Don't forget, Yvonne, that I am debarred from sharing your confidence. Dare I ask, for instance, if at some future date you will probably become Mrs. Laurence Tollemache?"
The girl flushed under this wholly unexpected thrust. First her father, now her mother, had voiced such a far-fetched notion! "I don't know," she said simply.
"The events of the last week have taught me the un-wisdom of thinking that we can forecast the future; but I can say now, with the utmost candor, that I will never leave my father."
At the moment she had no other thought than a disavowal of her prospective marriage with Tollemache, or any other man; but her mother cowered as though flinching from a blow, and Yvonne was instantly aware that the words had conveyed a meaning far beyond their intent.
"Oh, dear!" she sighed. "How easily one can be misunderstood! Now it is stupid that you and I should be at cross purposes in a matter of this sort. Will it help if I tell you what my father said this morning? He asked me why you had decided that Mr. Carmac should be buried here, and I gave it as my opinion that you meant to remain in Pont Aven a considerable time. Was I mistaken?"
The older woman's face became a shade whiter; but she replied steadily enough, "Something of the sort had certainly occurred to me."
"But you must abandon it, Dear," said the girl earnestly, dropping at her mother's feet, and taking one thin hand in both hers. "If you do that, everything will go wrong. Dad and you cannot possibly live in a small place like this, where everybody knows everybody else, where the history of each family or individual is common property, and where gossip would soon find flaws in the pretense that you and I are aunt and niece. If you continue to reside here, it means that Dad and I must go. No, you sha'n't weep, or be allowed to fret yourself into some misleading notion as to what I really mean. Once and for all, the possibility of that kind of lamentable thing happening must disappear.