But she only grew more alarmed at her own intrusion there. The easy, kindly gallantry of his manner scarcely reassured her; she was but a child, and a child reared in formal and severe codes. She doubted that she was guilty of some grave offence in standing under a palm-tree beside a group of camellias with a person whom she had scarcely seen before. She had neither the habits of the world nor the conventional badinage which could have met his courtesy on its own ground and replied to it in a few careless phrases. But it seemed to him that her silence was golden, as golden as the gleams in her changeful hazel eyes as the sun smote on them.
‘If you would allow me to go,’ she murmured, ‘I have quite enough flowers here. It is such a small church, and the orchids would be much too rare——’
‘If the orchids were made of rubies and pearls, what happier fate could they ask than to fall from your hands on to the altars of the Madonna?’ said Othmar, as he broke off the blossoms of his camellias with no sparing hand.
At that moment the head-gardener, alarmed and disturbed at the message which he had received from his master, came in sight with a basket hurriedly filled with some of the choicest treasures of his forcing-houses.
Othmar took it from him:
‘You did quite right,’ he said in a low tone, ‘to make my friends welcome to the gardens in my absence, but another time, M. Duvelleroy, make them welcome to the best; do not reserve it for the markets and the florist shops of Nice.’
The man, guilty, and taken at a disadvantage, had no time to prepare a lie; he grew red, and stammered, and was thankful for his master’s gesture of dismissal as Othmar turned from him impatiently and offered the orchids to the girl.
‘You are angry with him,’ she said, anxiety conquering her timidity.
‘Not so; I am grateful to him,’ said Othmar. ‘But I shall, perhaps, be angry with my house-steward, whose duty it is to keep these rogues clean-handed. If he had given you his best flowers I would have pensioned him for life, but to limit you to taking what he did not want to sell, was to disgrace S. Pharamond.’
‘Indeed, he has been very kind all these three winters,’ she murmured, in infinite distress at the thought that she had inadvertently injured the man in his master’s opinion.