Then a smile would go round the table, and coughs and suppressed chokings would be heard, and M. Isidore would dance with rapture in the corridor outside, and, on being severely interrogated by Ermengarde and the thin man afterwards, would truthfully say that he only asked Mademoiselle if she had heard of this curious custom of dieting on frogs for courage, and with regard to Mont Agel had chanced to mention that the public were excluded from that, as from all terrain militaire, and that many tanks containing frogs were there, as everywhere in the hills.
"The imagination of Mademoiselle," he would observe innocently, "invests things with a magic of its own. In short, she is a poet." Then he would laugh gently, and Ermengarde would shudder for his future, though she was not above suggesting to him themes similar to the results of a frog diet for Miss Boundrish's imagination to develop. So that table d'hôte was sometimes the scene of some remarkable additions to human knowledge.
To account for her various and invincible charms, speculation as to where Miss Boundrish had been dragged up was frequent and diverse. Yet her parents were there in attendance upon her, harmless, worthy people of the comfortable, Philistine, mid-middle class, the father rather deaf—he had registered her with two r's, because her mother insisted on the short o in Doris, and the man was too logical to leave his child with insufficient letters—the mother placidly content with the wildest utterances of her only child, and both well trained in the ways in which modern parents are expected to go. That no subject was too abstruse for Dorris's discussion, and that nothing could be spoken of upon which she was not quite as well informed as anyone present, or better, caused them no apparent surprise. But Miss Boundrish's father was a little deaf, and Miss Boundrish's mother once confided to the thin man that it was a little tiring to be the mother of an exceptionally gifted and accomplished child, and that a few days' visit to Nice, contemplated by Dorris, would afford her a welcome opportunity of taking a "much-needed" rest. "I should like," she sighed, "to have two solid days to do nothing in and to think nothing in—and," she added, after a pause, "to fear nothing in."
"So that one hopes the fair Dorris doesn't beat her," the thin man commented to Ermengarde, who thought her quite capable of it. But Agatha suggested that even Miss Boundrish's mother might not be quite insensible to the fury some of her little ways evoked from the community; that pretty little way of drawing up a chair or of walking up and stopping dead for the express purpose of breaking into intimate or interesting dialogue, that even prettier way of pursuing people bent on solitude, dual or otherwise, to pleasant points of view, and pouring out entirely familiar, guide-book information.
As, for instance, when the setting sun brought the craggy peaks that wall the high hill-village of St. Agnes into unusual beauty, and a party coming home from an excursion and another drawn out to the mountain from the hotel, stood silently enjoying it, and Dorris's high voice suddenly rang over the gorge with the history of the walled hill-villages, of the abduction of the innocent young Agnes by Saracens in one of their raids, and of the miracle wrought by her faith, which resulted in the conversion of many, the restoration of St. Agnes to her home among the crags, and a yearly commemoration of the event to this day by a procession of villagers.
"Why," murmured the thin man on that occasion, "why are there no Saracens to-day?"
"There are plenty, Mr. Welbourne," cried the shrill voice unexpectedly. "I saw some Moors in the town yesterday. They're all the same, you know."
"But they don't——" the thin man paused, allowing a daring word to die on his lips. "That is—the great days of old—the days of daring and romance—are over. We live in a degenerate age."
He spoke so mournfully that Miss Boundrish was much moved, and joined him in lamentation over the past, while every heart present echoed his unspoken thought, that a Saracen raid upon the Riviera might involve the abduction of Miss Boundrish, the mere idea of which filled them with joy. They were sure that she would have pleased the Saracenic taste, and doubted if her prayers would work a miracle.
"Where on earth did you pick up that Somers girl, Mrs. Allonby?" the sweet girl asked one day with pleasing directness and candour. It was during a descent upon the town to see the Carnival, arranged between the thin man, Ermengarde, and Agatha. Miss Boundrish, overhearing this arrangement the night before—she always overheard everything—had offered to make a fourth in the party, so suddenly, so loudly, and with such a certainty of conferring a favour, and also so immediately in the hearing of her mother, that neither of the three was ready with a civil excuse for declining the honour, though each said sadly to the others afterwards, "Why are there no Saracens now?"