"Say," cried Mrs. Dinwiddie with sudden inspiration, "what was M. Isidore's mot on the Boundrish gell?"
"Ah! M. Isidore's mot," echoed Ermengarde, "how did it run?"
"To be sure, M. Isidore's mot," went from mouth to mouth, ending in a general shout of laughter and ejaculations of ecstasy; but what the mot was poor Dorris never heard, for the simple and sufficient reason that M. Isidore was entirely innocent of having so much as imagined one, and was at that moment bending over the rose-covered rail above the path, with gesticulations expressive of mingled delight and resentment at the liberty taken with his name, to the great joy of Bertie Trevor, who made gestures of defiance at him in return. At this, M. Isidore, shaking his head as if in despair of the group below, turned his attention to Dorris—whom he could see through a chink in the rye-straw partition, and whose reception of public incense he had watched with tender, if spasmodic, interest from time to time—and was rewarded by perceiving symptoms of severe internal perturbation in the fair lady's demeanour.
The good-hearted little man had substantial and most bitter cause to dislike Dorris and all her ways; few things would have given him greater satisfaction than her instant and final disappearance from Les Oliviers, from France, from any and every place in which he might henceforth walk all his life long; but he had a heart and a soft one; he had also a French tenderness for the smaller woes of women, and what he saw through the chink smote him with such compunction that he left his seeds, leapt lightly down from the platform and ran round to the path, where the group of traducers were loitering, holding out his hands in appeal.
"Mais, mais, mesdames, messieurs! c'est un peu fort!" he cried; "does one talk so of ladies?"
"We were only admiring the dear girl's little ways," Ermengarde explained, "and her beauty."
"I do love her little way of listening to people talking among themselves, and picking their brains and passing their things off as her own," Major Norris said. "And that of patronizing her betters and flatly contradicting people on subjects she hasn't had the chance of understanding—even if she had the brains."
"The way she explained to me how we run elections in the States," added Mrs. Dinwiddie's husband, a humble, unconsidered dependent, occasionally found handy to fetch and carry for his liege lady. "She'd just as soon tell the Almighty the way to run the Universe, you bet——"
"But that charming laugh, Mr. Dinwiddie, surely that atones for much," murmured Lady Seaton, arriving from the convent to the Carnival tune that Bertie Trevor was whistling, as he had done at intervals during the whole interview, to the deep disgust and irritation of Dorris, who was more impatient than most people of tiresome tricks like humming and whistling—tricks she arrogated to herself as the peculiar privilege of one too lovely and attractive not to be always sure to please whatever she did. Dorris was, of course, not aware that whenever anyone came down the path or up the path or from the convent steep, Bertie, standing out on a little jut of rock, looking idly about, instantly began that Carnival tune, unless it was a stranger. In that case he whistled the Marseillaise and the talk paused.
"O Lord, that everlasting gurgle," growled the Major; "it's all over the place from morning till night. What the dickens does she do it for?"