“Ho, ho!” cried Piotr, spying a tall, black-robed figure emerging from the Louis XI. wing by a postern-door all overrun with creepers. “Where have you been, Uncle Pierre? You’re always fussing on that side of the quadrangle. Have you a surprise hidden there for me?”
The Abbé de Kerdren received the flushed, laughing boy full against his long legs without a reproof; then bending, he lifted him to his left arm.
“You are always so unexpected, Piotr,” he remarked. “Your rubber ball would be no worse as far as bounce is concerned, but decidedly lighter.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Uncle Pierre?” grumbled Piotr, snatching at the abbé’s long sash as if it had been a bell-rope. “Answer me, please!”
“Indeed, Majesty! Well, as you have condescended to say ‘please,’ I will confide to you that there is not the least bit of a surprise in store for you, neither in the Louis-Onze wing nor anywhere else.”
“Tfou!” came from Piotr in an admirable imitation of the mujik’s favorite expression of disapproval. “Tfou! I don’t think you’re telling the truth, Uncle Pierre, because I know there’s going to be a surprise pretty soon.”
“You’re not very polite, my Muscovite friend. And, by the way, what makes you think that there will be a surprise, after all? You seem pretty sure about it!”
Marguerite had drawn near and had swung herself to the parapet of the terrace, from which she dangled her little feet half a yard from the ground. She was barely listening, but still she heard, and Piotr’s next remark caused her to suddenly catch hold of the stonework on both sides as if in need of steadying herself.
“Papa is the surprise,” piped the boy, glancing triumphantly up in the abbé’s face. “He is coming here—right here—to Salvières in a day or two.”
The priest’s expectant smile was wiped out as with a cloth, and it was in a tone of strangely disproportionate reproof that he replied, “What silly yarn is this, and who told you such a fib, to begin with?”