Salvières twirled the ends of his mustache with a familiar gesture. He felt annoyed, not only on account of the slighting reference to Marguerite, not only because he was not accustomed to be spoken to in that peevish manner, but because he was becoming aware of a decided sense of disquiet concerning Basil’s future happiness—Basil, who was as near and dear to him as if he had been his blood brother. Jean de Salvières had not expected to find in the twenty-year-old bride of his brother-in-law—who had been described to him as a well-born beauty—so pert and altogether uninhabitable a nature. Beautiful she certainly was—of that there could not be the faintest doubt—but her self-assertion, her cutting way of saying things, and her lack of punctilio, did not impress him as befitting so young a woman, and once again he tugged impatiently at his mustache. He was too frank to attempt playing her at the end of a line with the cunning and savoir-faire of an angler (although this would have been easy enough to him) in order to pry more deeply into her character. Moreover, she repelled him. If he liked a person he showed it at once; if he disliked one, he made a point of having nothing more to do with him or with her; but here was a problem not soluble by either plan; for he could neither ignore her nor cast her aside, owing to many reasons, chief among which was the dawning conviction that in Basil’s interest it would be well if he followed up Laurence a little, helped her if he could, advised her, certainly.
He and his wife had been in India on a pleasure trip at the time of the marriage, and his surprise at what he now discovered was painful.
“The famous ‘Gamin’!” he said, speculatively. “Why famous? Has that dear little thing rendered herself guilty of any more heroic deeds since I last had the happiness of seeing her?”
“Heroic deeds? I was not aware she dealt in that sort of thing!” said Laurence, who for so lofty a soul was now within measurable distance of snappishness, and she looked at Salvières with a severity indicative of an intention to keep him strictly in his place. Yet had she taken the trouble to do so, she might have realized that she sat in the presence of that rare and indefinable creation—a strong man, whom no feminine trickery could find at any moment off his guard.
“I beg your pardon,” he quietly replied. “She frequently, on the contrary, deals in such things. Only a few months ago she jumped into the sea from a high rock—a very high rock, understand—to save from drowning a silly gawk of a ship’s boy. Half a gale was blowing at the time, and it was something more than a man’s ordinary risk for her to take.”
Laurence’s eyelids fluttered, but she did not actually raise her eyes to the uncomfortable neighbor whose simple directness of speech found no favor in her sight.
“Really!” she remarked. “I never heard of it!”
“It is your loss then, madame, and I am glad to have been so fortunate as to repair this lack of knowledge on your part.”
She made a grimace expressive of real annoyance. “I am not much of a gossip,” she shrugged, “and therefore never greatly given to listen to it.”
“That being the case,” retorted Salvières, “we may remain hopeful that this will go no further. Good actions are best left out of general conversation, excepting in such particular cases as this one. They are so seldom credited.” [“Why in the world does she hate the ‘Gamin’?” he was asking himself. “What has the poor child done to her?”]