"No," he said.
"Do you know where she is buried?"
"No."
She sighed. Her light-hearted companion's sudden taciturnity was not lost on her. Neither Madame Pitou, Ingersoll's friend and landlady during eighteen years, nor Tollemache, who worked with him daily, could read his eyes like Yvonne, and she knew he was acting a part when he smiled because Sainte Barbe's well announced that she would be married at the second asking. And the odd thing was that she had endeavored to drop the first pin so that it would not fall into the fateful space. None but she herself had noted how it plunged slantwise through the water as though drawn by a lodestone.
Even Tollemache nursed a grievance against the well's divination. "I say," he broke in, "that pin proposition is all nonsense, don't you think?"
For some occult reason she refused to answer as he hoped she would. "You never can tell," she said. "Mère Pitou believes in it, and she has had a long experience of life's vagaries."
From some distance came Madeleine's plaint. "Just imagine! Six times! In six years I shall be twenty-five. I don't credit a word of it—so there! At the last pardon Peridot danced with me all the afternoon."
Even little Barbe was not satisfied. "Mama said the other day," she confided, "that I might be married before I was twenty."
Ingersoll and Mère Pitou, bringing up the rear, were silent; Madame because this hill also was steep, and Ingersoll because of thoughts that came unbidden. In fact, Sainte Barbe had perplexed some of her pilgrims.