“You like Captain Stuart, eh?” said M. Popeau.
He was looking straight before him and he spoke quite lightly, yet Lily felt a little confused. She knew that he had seen her blush.
“Yes,” she said at last, “I do like him. He seems to me so—so——”
“I know,” said M. Popeau, “‘straight.’ That’s a fine English word. You are right, Miss Fairfield. Captain Stuart is a ‘white’ man—another of your English expressions that I like, that I have adopted for my own. But, Mademoiselle, he is also a jealous man. I would not like to make Captain Stuart jealous.”
And then all at once Lily remembered something the young Scotsman had said to her, something of which he had had the grace to be ashamed a moment later. “Foreign fellows are so infernally familiar!”—that was what Captain Stuart had said to Lily Fairfield after there had come a laughing interchange of words between herself and M. Popeau. It was impossible that the Frenchman could have heard those words. And yet—and yet—Lily felt a little uncomfortable.
“It is lucky that I am an old man,” went on her companion quietly. “Were I not an old man, I feel that our friend might possibly become jealous even of me. That would be most cruel, most unfair, and very hard on poor Papa Popeau! Hein?”
He pirouetted round on his heel for a moment, and then bowed.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “of all your servants I am the humblest and the most devoted, and I regret very much now that I did not compel you to allow me to go into the villa with you yesterday afternoon!”
“I am sorry too,” said Lily in a low voice. “But I don’t know—I think Aunt Cosy would have had it out with me just the same after you had gone. She didn’t say much till the Count and the man from the police had left the house, and then—oh, then, M. Popeau, I’ve never seen anybody so angry!”
As they came through the gate to the cemetery they saw Captain Stuart’s lithe figure striding impatiently up and down the road. He took Lily’s hand—she had taken off her glove—and held it tightly for a moment, then he dropped it.