The Secret of Toni

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Madame Marcel advanced, smiling, and accepted the nosegay shyly. Toni, meanwhile, had slipped behind a screen which concealed the stove.

“How very charming you are looking to-day, Madame. No one would dream that you had a son as old as Toni. You should represent him as your younger brother,” said the sergeant gallantly and quite unaware of Toni behind the screen.

For all Madame Marcel declared she never meant to marry again, nevertheless, she was a woman, and the sergeant’s compliments tickled her agreeably, so she smiled coyly at this and declared she looked a hundred.

“Nonsense,” cried the sergeant, “you don’t look more than twenty-five. And, by the way, Madame, my sister and my daughter are making up a party for to-morrow—I am off duty for the whole afternoon—and we should be very much pleased if you would join us in a little excursion by the tramway to a very pleasant place about two miles from here, in the country. There is an inn with a garden, and we can take our luncheon with us and order the wine from the inn. We shall start at five o’clock, and we shall hope to have the pleasure of your charming company.”

That was too much for Toni. He suddenly emerged from behind the screen and said, grasping the sergeant’s hand with effusion:

“Thank you, thank you, Sergeant, so much. We will accept with pleasure. I think I can get off, too, by applying to Lieutenant Verney.”

The sergeant scowled at Toni. Here was a pretty kettle of fish. He had no notion of having him with their party, but there was now no help for it. The prospect was charming for Toni. The sergeant, he felt sure, would devote himself to Madame Marcel, and then Toni and Denise would be left to themselves—only, what was to become of Mademoiselle Duval? Toni knew the Golden Lion well, also its garden, and orchard, and it was full of little sequestered places where he might have a quiet word with Denise except for Mademoiselle Duval. But Toni was a strategist of no mean order, and if he once got Denise in the garden of the Golden Lion he thought he could see her for a few minutes alone. So the party was made up for the next day if the weather should permit. Toni, too, could get off after parade, which was at four o’clock, and everything seemed most auspicious, except concerning Mademoiselle Duval.

As Toni walked his beat that night, for he was doing sentry duty, he began to turn over in his mind various plans by which he could get rid of his prospective aunt-in-law, and suddenly a brilliant idea came to him. He knew Mademoiselle Duval was mortally afraid of snakes. It is true it was hardly the season for snakes, being the middle of September, but this would make no difference to Mademoiselle Duval, who shuddered even in January at the thought of a snake. Toni, therefore, laid his plans, and the next morning he contrived to get off for an hour and went to Mademoiselle Duval’s lodgings.

Denise was out, and Mademoiselle Duval was reading the weekly religious newspaper, which was her sole literary recreation.

“Mademoiselle,” said Toni, in a low voice, so that his mother, on the same floor, might not hear him, “this afternoon, I believe, we are all to go for an excursion to the Golden Lion and have tea in the garden. I want to ask you, as a favor, not to mention to my mother that the place is full of snakes of all sorts. I have been there often, and I have never gone in my life that I did not see a snake, and sometimes half a dozen, in that garden. They are not at all dangerous, but if my mother saw one it would alarm her so much, and I don’t wish her to know that there are any to be seen.”