“Treasure is great anxiety, whether it is your kind of treasure or mine, M. Vanderlin,” said Boo’s mother. “You have been very kind to this naughty little girl; and we have trespassed too long on your hospitality. Yet, if it wouldn’t bore you too much, I should so like to see something of the house before I go. I have often wished to enter as I sallied past it or drove through your olive woods.”
He assented to her wish with a reluctance which she ignored; and he showed her over the chief part of his château, which contained much which was beautiful and rare. Boo, wishing for everything she saw but warned by her mother’s eyes not to ask for anything more, went jumping and running through the rooms, her hat in her hand and the light on her golden head.
“You have several children, I think,” said Vanderlin to her mother.
“Four,” replied Mouse; and she felt that she would have preferred for this hermit to know nothing about her by reputation.
“Are they all with you?”
“No; they are little boys; their guardians have more to do with them than I.”
There was a sadness in her tone which made him look at her with a certain interest.
“Law is very hard on women,” she added. “Especially as regards their offspring.”
She was, to men of serious temper, most interesting in her maternal feeling, and it was genuine in a sense though used with artifice. Vanderlin looked at her with less indifference and unwillingness, but she made little way in his intimacy; he remained distant in his courtesy, and as she drove away with baskets of roses for herself and of fruit for her little daughter she felt discontentedly that she had gone through the trouble of her invention, and spent the money which the lost boat would cost, for small purpose.
Boo turned and looked back at the turrets of the château already distant above its woods.