“Oh yes, indeed,” answered Lucie. “I love her very much, but not like Sophie. You love your aunts and grandmama, but not like your mother.”
That was quite true, for Paul was as fond, in his quiet way, of his mother and father, as Lucie, in her violent and demonstrative fashion was of Sophie, or as Toni was curiously fond of Madame Marcel.
CHAPTER III
While this conversation was going on, Toni, who had seen Lucie go chasing after the butterfly, watched Captain and Madame Ravenel. Paul had told him there was something mysterious about the pair, and Toni was vaguely conscious of this strangeness, and felt in his childish, ignorant way, like Paul, the charm of Madame Ravenel’s touching beauty. He heard Madame Ravenel say:
“What can have become of the child?” and Captain Ravenel got up at once to look for her, going a little way along the path down which Lucie had disappeared. And then a strange thing happened before Toni’s eyes. A young officer coming by, with a waxed mustache and his cap set jauntily on the side of his head, stopped directly in front of Madame Ravenel, and looked at her with a smile which Toni did not at all understand, but which made Madame Ravenel’s pale face flush to the roots of her dark hair. Then the officer said, in an insolent yet insinuating voice:
“May I be permitted, Madame, to admire your beauty a little closer?”—and sat down on the bench without any invitation, throwing his arm around the back of it so as almost to embrace Madame Ravenel, who started up with a cry. At that moment, Captain Ravenel appeared at the back of the bench. He was not so big a man as the young officer, but, catching him by his collar, he threw him sprawling on the ground, and then deliberately stamped upon him as he lay prostrate. Madame Ravenel stood as still as a statue. The officer sprang from the ground and would have flown at Captain Ravenel’s throat, but two other officers passing ran toward them and separated them, and pinioned the arms of the officer to his side. Toni heard Captain Ravenel say, as he handed his card to one of the officers:
“I saw this man grossly insult this lady, and he shall pay for it with his life,”—and then Madame Ravenel swayed a minute or two and fell over in a dead faint. The two officers hurried their comrade off, leaving Captain Ravenel alone with Madame Ravenel, who lay prone on the grass, quite insensible.