"Won't ask her?"
"Will call you by your real name."
"That's what she said," Cyprian admitted. "But, as man to man, John, I must warn you that she will probably have the last word in the matter, even if it is an inconsistent one. I have known her longer than you have."
"But I have known her most," returned John in some agitation. "She was my mother first."
Cyprian took warning.
"God bless you, yes. She would be the first to admit it. Go your rebel way, then, and get the better of the woman. I shan't interfere. I have my own troubles."
The conversation took place on a sunny portion of the Brittany coast where Ferlie had, for some weeks, been trustfully waiting for John and Cyprian to decide that they liked one another. Neither of them possessing gaily expansive natures the discovery took time.
A neutrality pact had been sealed earlier on this particular afternoon when Cyprian, armed with an offering of peppermint rock, having fallen unawares into the well of sea-water outside John's castle, had aroused in himself a throng of dimly ecstatic recollections and intimations of the Immortality of Childhood, as the poet simply puts it, and so flung himself whole-heartedly into the business of constructing an aqueduct, a smouldering ambition of his childhood, ever frustrated by the inopportune interference of the old and wise....
"You," said John presently, touched by his conscientious absorption, "may have the 'nother stick of peppermint rock when you've done."
"If it's to save your life I will accept it but I feel it only honest to confess that I am not allowed to eat sweets between meals."