“They must be atrocious—abominable!” snapped poor Marguerite, her dark eyebrows meeting in a furious frown above her exquisitely arched little nose.
“N-no, not that; merely very tiresome and authoritative—insular to a terrible extent! He, as I have often told you, is a yachtsman above, before, after, and during everything else; by no means unkind, but as stubborn as a whole troop of mules. She—well, she’s Elizabethan; not kindly nor good-looking, but worse! Brick-red morally and physically, without any luster or brilliancy, fond of absolute power, narrow-minded, and—oh, well, quite unendurable.”
“O-o-o-o-h!” gasped Marguerite. “Oh ... o ... o ... o ... h!”
“I am their ward,” Laurence continued. “They are my omnipotent guardians, and I can never hope to get rid of them, for I am a beggar, living on their rather acid bounty. Do you understand, petit ‘Gamin’?”
No, petit “Gamin” did not understand. There was something askew in that speech, somehow, something that grated upon her, though just what it was she could not have told. She therefore remained silent, her eyes fixed upon two yellow butterflies chasing each other round and round a clump of blue hortensias artistically grouped at the corner of the cloister beneath the leaden rain-spout, whose frequent libations kept those gorgeous globes of bloom from reverting to their original creamy pink.
“A beggar!” the child said at last. “A beggar!... Then why don’t you come and live with me at Plenhöel instead of with them in England?” There was extraordinary contempt in the way she said “them.” “I have only another year to stay here,” she passionately pleaded, “and every single thing I own will be half yours, Loris darling—every single thing!”
Eyes and hands uplifted, she gazed imploringly at Laurence, and for an instant a softer expression flitted across the latter’s somewhat sulky face.
“They would not let me do that—at any rate, not until I come of age,” she asserted. “No, decidedly not.... And, what’s more, I would not accept charity from your people, who are no relations of mine.”
Marguerite looked at her friend in positive amazement. “Charity!” she indignantly remonstrated; and then violently she cast herself prone upon the green border of the allée, kicking her tiny toes into the turf. “Charity indeed!” she angrily cried from within the shelter of her intertwined arms. “Charity—to you!”
“Mademoiselle de Plenhöel!” a voice expostulated behind her; and Mademoiselle de Plenhöel regained her feet with amazing promptness, crimson with confusion, to face the most dreaded of her educators, Madame Marie-Antoinette, whose rigid manners and severe cast of countenance were the iron mask of a heart unsuspectedly tender.