It had been definitely settled that Eugene and the priest were to leave Boston at the end of the week, and sail across the sea to France.
Mrs. Hardy rarely spoke of the boy’s departure; but when she did, the reference was made cheerfully, and as if she expected that he would really go. In the meantime, when she could spare a few hours from her household duties, she busied herself with making preparations for his journey by adding to his rather scanty wardrobe. Eugene went shopping with her while the sergeant and the priest were engaged in sight-seeing.
Late in the afternoon of the day preceding the one on which they were to leave, Eugene took the curé aside, and requested his companionship while he made a call of importance.
“It is to see the father of the little Virgie,” he said to Mrs. Hardy who was standing near.
“Oh, yes! I understand,” she said; “you wish to say good-by to your small playmate.”
Eugene did not wish to say good-by to his small playmate. However, he did not explain this to Mrs. Hardy, but simply gave her an inscrutable look from his deep black eyes, and walked out of the room with the priest.
It was a dark, chilly afternoon, and the priest shivered slightly inside his black cassock as they wended their way toward the broad and fashionable avenue where Virgie’s parents lived. He was not accustomed to such piercing winds in sunny France; and he murmured softly to himself, “Le climat de Loir-et-Cher est doux et tempéré.”
Mr. Manning, Virgie’s father, quite unaware of the visitors on their way to see him, had just come home from his office, and sat in his wife’s room talking to her, and waiting for dinner to be announced, when a maid knocked at the door, and said that a priest and a boy wanted to see him. He glanced sharply at her, and asked, “What are their names?”
“I forget, sir,” she said hesitatingly. “They were queer-sounding and foreign.”