"Tcha! Even a saint cannot obtain what Heaven does not allow."
Ingersoll laughed. "Mère Pitou may lose her breath; but she never loses her wit," he said. "Now I put forward a much more modest request. Most excellent Sainte Barbe, send me some mad dealer who will empty my studio at a thousand francs a canvas!"
Yvonne heard these words; yet, be it noted, she asked the saint to make her father happy, not prosperous. It was then that the bell rang a second time.
"Tiens!" exclaimed Madame Pitou. "The saint replies!"
"Like every magician, you achieve your effect by the simplest of contrivances—when one peeps behind the scenes," said Ingersoll. "Old Père Jean, custodian of the chapel, who will meet us at the summit, keeps a boy on guard, so that all good pilgrims may be put in the right frame of mind by hearing the bell accidentally. The boy saw our girls first, and then spied us. Hence the double tolling. Now, Madame, crush me! I can see lightning in your eye."
"Mark my words, Monsieur Ingersoll, the saint will send that dealer, and he will certainly be mad, since none but a lunatic would pay a thousand francs for any picture of yours."
Ingersoll seized her free arm. "Run her up, for Heaven's sake, Tollemache!" he cried in English. "Her tongue has scarified me every day for eighteen years, and age cannot wither, nor custom stale, its infinite variety."
Laughing, struggling, crying brokenly that ces Américains would be the death of her, and tripping along the while with surprising lightness of foot,—for Mère Pitou had been noted as the best dancer of the gavotte at any pardon held within a radius of ten miles of Pont Aven,—she was hurried to the waiting girls.
"Ah, that rascal of a father of yours!" she wheezed to Yvonne, relapsing into the Breton language, as was her invariable habit when excited, either in anger or mirth. "And this other overgrown imp! When they're beaten in argument they try to kill me. Gars! A nice lot I'm bringing to the holy chapel!"