"Oh, please don't talk in that strain. I cannot bear it!" pleaded the girl.
"It hurts, of course; but isn't it better to look at the facts squarely? I am surprised that Mr. Raymond, who has more experience of life, should have flown on a wild-goose chase to Quimperlé. It is nothing else. If Madeleine is actually on her way to Paris, the journey is a matter of obvious arrangement. Rupert will unquestionably meet her at the Gare St. Lazare, and what opportunity will your deputy have then of making any appeal to the girl herself? Rupert would simply take him by the collar and swing him aside. You see, Yvonne, I am forty-two, and you are twenty. We survey life from different angles."
"From different levels, at any rate," said Yvonne, closing her ears to the cold accuracy of her mother's reasoning. "You gaze down on us simple Pont Avenois from the altitude of New York and London, while I cannot peer above the eaves of our little mills. I am looking now through the low door of a desolate cottage, and I can discern a broken-hearted woman crooning her sorrow by the embers of a dying fire. Oh, Mother, Mother, if ever you would have me love you as a daughter, you must try and realize that my very heartstrings are twined round my Breton friends, that I rejoice with them and grieve with them, that I love them for their many virtues and condone their few faults! I have never knowingly wished evil to anyone, but if God in His mercy should preserve my dear Madeleine from that horrid man I would not care what means His wisdom adopted. Even though Fosdyke marries her, Madeleine will not be happy, and I cannot think that if he meant to behave honorably he would have tempted her to plunge her people into such distress by leaving home clandestinely."
Mrs. Carmac could have rocked with laughter at the notion of Rupert Fosdyke marrying Madeleine Demoret; but she curbed the impulse. Despite her primitive simplicity, Yvonne was in an excitable mood that night, and this affair must be allowed to settle itself without disturbing their good relations.
"Well," she sighed, affecting an accord she did not feel, "we can only hope now that your telegram will prove effective. Who is the person whose aid Mr. Raymond is securing?"
"A Monsieur Duquesne."
Mrs. Carmac wrinkled her smooth forehead. "I have not heard the name," she said, after a pause. "But there is nothing unusual in that. Raymond is curiously secretive. Any other man, living in a household on the footing he occupied in the Chase and in Charles Street, would have spoken at times of his relatives. He, for all I knew of his earlier history, might have been born in—Saturn. I was going to say Mars; but Mr. Raymond does not meet one's ideal of a Martian."
At that Yvonne was constrained to smile. Neither she nor the woman who dismissed Raymond and Duquesne so flippantly could guess what sinister influences lurked behind the association of those two men. An astrologer would have found something ominous in that haphazard reference to the planetary harbingers of disaster, Saturn and Mars, and, oddly enough, a half-thought of the sort did flit through Yvonne's mind, because she often found amusement and interest, during the mild and clear winters of Brittany, in reading the firmament from a stellar atlas, and there was hardly a constellation in the northern heavens she could not name at sight.
At that moment, however, relief from a rather forced conversation came in the shape of Captain Popple's burly form.