Madeleine was silenced; so Madame answered her own question.
"No man with eyes like a tomcat could ever turn my head!" she snorted.
For once her gift of biting repartee served a good purpose. It effectually distracted attention from Ingersoll's half-demented state, while father and daughter were given a breathing space before plunging into an explanation that might affect the future in such wise that the stream of life would never again flow on the placid course it had followed during many happy and uneventful years.
Within the cottage, too, Mère Pitou's bustling ways interposed a further barrier. She drove the artist to his room, set Madeleine to help Yvonne undress, "and rub her till she's as red as a boiled lobster," prepared two steaming glasses of mulled wine, scolded each unwilling patient until the decoction was taken, and wanted to massage Ingersoll; an attention that he avoided only by declaring positively that he would not indulge in a hot bath at all unless she cleared out.
Luckily a wetting from salt water is seldom harmful if accompanied by exercise, and Ingersoll had never been really chilled; while Yvonne had not only kept comparatively dry, but had been shielded from the wind during the homeward voyage. When the two met in the studio, a large room that Ingersoll had built on the north side of the house, the frenzy and tumult of a tremendous discovery had died down, and each was ready to make due allowance for the other's suffering.
Yvonne wore her Breton dress, and her father had discarded his artist's clothes for a suit of blue serge. Seldom, perhaps not twice in a year, did he appear in evening dress. He shunned society, and disliked its livery. For that reason he had removed from the Hotel Julia soon after arriving at Pont Aven with Yvonne, then an engaging mite hardly a year old. Ostensibly he wanted a spacious studio; in reality he sought seclusion.
As for Yvonne, she did not even possess a dinner gown; though she and her father were often welcome guests at the houses of the small artistic coterie that makes the village its abiding place. But pictures, not fashion plates, ruled the roost therein, and no grande dame whom chance brought to these friendly gatherings could plume herself that her "Paris model" frock eclipsed the quaint charm of Yvonne's peasant costume.
The girl had grown quite accustomed to the demand invariably put forward by Ingersoll before accepting an invitation that he should be told the names of any strangers who would be present. If she gave a passing thought to the matter, she fancied that her father had early in life quarreled with his relatives, and wished to avoid a haphazard meeting with certain members of his family. Singularly enough, Tollemache, her greatest friend among the men of Pont Aven, did not conceal the fact that he too was at loggerheads with his own people. Only that day had he been on the verge of some explanation of this unfortunate state of affairs. How little did she dream then that the carefully hidden secret which led her own father to bury his talents in a Brittany fishing village soon after she was born would be dragged into light before the sun went down!
When she entered the studio she found her father seated in a roomy wickerwork chair, and gazing disconsolately into the flames of a roaring log fire. He had aged within the hour; his already slight figure seemed to have shrunk; he did not even turn his head when the door opened.