“Oh, Mademoiselle, one ought to learn—indeed one should—particularly if your grandmother and your sister Sophie wish you to do it. I don’t mind learning in the least—I am going into the army, and if I don’t study and can’t pass the army examinations, I shall have to be a clerk or something of that sort—my parents are not rich, you know—so I must learn all I can.”
“Tra la la,” cried Lucie, stopping in the path, and doing a skirt dance, fluffing her voluminous little skirts up and down as she had seen a young lady do at the circus; “you are a boy, and you have to learn. Who was that black-eyed, dirty little boy I saw walking with you on the street the other day?”
“That was Toni,” answered Paul, and proceeded to tell who Toni was.
“And is he fond of learning, too?” asked Lucie.
“Not a bit,” sighed Paul.
“Then he must be just like me.”
Paul burst into a sudden fit of laughter at the idea of Toni and Lucie being alike. Lucie seemed to him like a little princess out of a story-book.
“I will tell you what, Paul,” said she, “when I am eighteen, as I told you once before, I shall have heaps and heaps of money from America that I can do with as I please, and nobody can stop me, and I made up my mind, a long time ago, that I am coming to Bienville to live with Sophie and Captain Ravenel—oh, I do love them so much—they are so good to me! Then you will be an officer, and you will have a beautiful sword, and a helmet with a horse-hair plume in it like the officers I see walking about here, and then I shall go to a ball, and some one will bring you up and introduce you to me, and say, ‘Mademoiselle, may I introduce Lieutenant Verney?’ and then I shall bow to you as if I never saw you before, and then you will say, ‘Mademoiselle, will you do me the honor to give me this dance?’ and we shall dance together, and then when nobody can hear, we shall talk about having known each other always, and it will be our secret, and no one will know it but ourselves. Won’t it be charming?”
Paul looked at Lucie with a new, strange light in his eyes. Lucie, although quite unknown to herself, was much further along the path to womanhood than Paul was to manhood, but she seemed to be showing him some charming, prophetic vision.
“And you must not mention to a soul,” said Lucie, “that you ever spoke one word to me before, and I will not tell any one that I ever spoke one word to you before. I was afraid to tell Sophie that I had talked with you, because she would be vexed with me, and would not give me another chance to get away from her. So let us agree never to mention each other’s names to any one, but every summer we shall meet at Bienville, and then, when we are grown up, we shall be introduced, but we shall know each other all the time, and then when nobody is listening, I shall call you Paul and you will call me Lucie.”