CHAPTER XV
Toni returned to the barracks confident of victory, and was not at all surprised when, at five o’clock, he met his mother and the sergeant and Denise at the tram station, to find that Mademoiselle Duval had a raging headache and was compelled to remain at home. The sergeant, too, rather liked the arrangement, except that he was afraid that Denise would not be sufficiently polite to Toni. So, on their way to the rendezvous he had warned her.
“Now, Denise,” he said, “I won’t have you running away from Toni and treating him like a dog before his mother this afternoon. You have got to be civil to him.”
“Yes, papa,” answered Denise, with the air of a martyr, “I suppose I shall have to be civil to him before his mother, but Toni really bores me dreadfully.” Oh! Denise, what a story-teller you are!
When they got on the tram it was so crowded that it was impossible for the party to get seats together, so Denise, making a pretty grimace on the sly at her father, went and sat with Toni quite at the end of the car, and out of sight of her father and Toni’s mother, and her first speech, whispered softly in his ear, was:
“Oh, Toni, how nice it is to be together like this.”
Toni answered not one word, but he looked at Denise with his whole soul shining out of his lustrous black eyes, and Denise thought him the finest young soldier in the world.
It was a warm September afternoon, and their road lay through the beautiful valley of the Seine. There were many family parties on the tram, and when they reached the Golden Lion the large garden and even the orchard beyond were full of tables at which people were eating and drinking. There were plenty of soldiers about, and some of Toni’s comrades would have been very much pleased at an introduction to the sergeant’s pretty daughter, but the sergeant would not oblige them, neither would Toni. The party seated themselves at a table under an acacia tree, which reminded Toni and Denise of that other acacia tree at Bienville under which they had sat and munched and loved in their childhood. Madame Marcel unpacked their lunch basket and they ordered wine and tea from the inn and proceeded to enjoy themselves. Under the combined influence of wine and woman the sergeant grew positively lover-like, and, when their tea was over and they got up to walk about the garden, he very soon managed to have Madame Marcel to himself. He was quite unconscious of being assisted in his manœuvers by Toni and Denise and Madame herself, who had a very good mind to give Toni all possible chances with Denise and her ten thousand francs. So presently Toni found himself alone with Denise in a little nook in the orchard, behind a great clump of dwarf plum trees. The soft light of evening was about them, the air was hushed and the stillness was only broken by the faint and distant sounds of merriment. All the world seemed fair and beautiful and peaceful, and the fairest thing of all to Toni was the blue heaven of Denise’s eyes. She wore a pretty blue gown, and a jaunty black hat upon her blond hair. Her eyes, which were as blue as her gown, were usually downcast, but were now upturned to Toni quite frankly. She had loved Toni as long as he had loved her—indeed, the world without Toni had seemed to her quite an impossible place. He said softly to her:
“Denise, in all those seven years that I did not see you did you ever think of me?”