"I," said Madge serenely, "found him entirely and altogether charming, as well as being one of the handsomest boys I've ever seen. And he's coming to have tea with me.... This, George," she turned to me, "is a friend of Jennie's we met while we were out. He'd been making a sketch of the sunset and was just packing up, so we walked along together. Oh yes, I know—I ought to be ashamed at my time of life—but he's the most adorable creature! A good deal like your Derwent Rose to look at—very like him, in fact—though of course the Bear's old enough to be his father. And listen to Alec, just because he was dressed as half the English and American students in Paris are dressed! I don't know whether Jennie's fallen in love with him, but I have!"
"And if he's English what's he called Arnaud for?" Alec demanded with renewed suspicion.
"Dear but simple husband, possibly he had a French father. Such things have been heard of, even in that Rough Island's Story of yours. If you'll make me out a list of the questions you want asked I'll get it all out of him when he comes to tea. In the meantime:—unless George would like to take me on the Casino for an hour—I think I shall go to bed. Feel like a modest flutter, George?"
"Then bed. I'll dream I won a lot of money. Unless I dream of young Arnaud. Don't let Alec fall asleep in his chair. Dors bien——"
She tripped out under the trophy of assegais.
I was hardly five minutes behind her. Slowly I ascended to my room, crossed to the window, and leaned out over the balcony.
So that was that. Simply, and without any fuss at all, his foot was in the door of Ker Annic. The whole thing had taken almost exactly twenty-four hours. In the space of two revolutions of the clock, he, from the lurking-place of his roadside hotel at St Briac, had contrived to get himself asked to the house to tea. I wondered what he would do about myself. Would he blandly bow, as if our acquaintance began at that moment, or would he advance with outstretched hand, own up to it, and act on the square? If he admitted his acquaintance with me, what questions of Alec's should I not have to answer? How answer them, how explain my concealment? How accept any responsibility whatever for him? Yet how avoid complete responsibility? Apparently only Jennie and the maid who had announced him knew of his furtive visit to myself the evening before; but Jennie knew, and what more she might learn when they put their heads together I could not guess. Perhaps little or nothing. Perhaps all....
My thoughts flew to Jennie again and the miracle of the past twenty-four hours for her. The first awakening look of that moment by the cars, the lovely and irreparable surrender in the Dinard Bazaar, her sobs against my shoulder that afternoon, the radiant burst in which she had realised that he too loved her—and then that evening's encounter whatever it had been, when apparently she had taken matters into her own hands, bowed to him, and spoken her first words to him in French, to be answered in English.... No wonder she could not yet realise it. The day before had found her a child, moody, wilful, not knowing what ailed her, but crying to Life to take her, use her and not spare her; now she was a woman, with a strange sweet turmoil in her bosom, and a quite matter-of-fact resolution in the brain beneath that red-gold hair. No need to ask whether she slept! Sleep, with that ache and bliss at war in her breast? She must be awake at that moment, wondering whether he was awake, knowing that he was awake, lying in her innocent bed with her face turned towards St Briac. His miniature was painted on the curtains of her closed but unsleeping eyes, the echo of his voice was in her ears as she had spoken to him in French, and he had answered—in English.
And by the way, why had he answered her in English? Only that morning he had cajoled me into talking French, at any rate among French people. Had he too, stupefied with bliss, answered her instinctively in her own native tongue and his? Or had he deliberately resolved that here at any rate should be no trick or stratagem to be subsequently explained, but a perfectly clean beginning? If so, how would he contrive to maintain it? How could he be secure that the contretemps of any single moment of the day would not catch him out? I remembered the masterfulness and skill with which he had managed me; had he his plans for the handling of the Airds also? Were they to be founded on the appearance of complete honesty, with only the trifling fact suppressed that he had lived a whole life before?