“Well,” said Guillot, after drinking a large glass of wine, “that shows that it don’t make any difference, and although a face may be or not,—and I say that it ain’t always a moustache behind a gate that does it; for you see, that when a person is frightened at things like that—why that’s how it is——”
“That’s all right, my man,” said the farmer’s wife, cutting short Guillot’s eloquence; “but if madame had seen that cross of honor on our friend Jacques’s stomach, I guess she wouldn’t have been afraid.”
“Oh!” said Adeline, “I don’t need to see it now, to realize my mistake. But what can you expect? his strange position—for women are timid, you know, and that face with moustaches, appearing all alone at the end of the garden——”
“Oh, yes! that’s so,” rejoined Guillot; “it ain’t surprising, and I think that I’d have been afraid myself; because the surprise, behind the gate, and moustaches, in a garden—a body can’t help himself.”
“Hold your tongue, my man! You’re a coward! Ain’t it a shame, cousin?”
“Ten thousand bayonets!” said Sans-Souci; “if robbers attacked the farm house, I promise you that I would make ’em turn to the right about and march!”
“Is your husband still at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges?” asked Jacques of Adeline, after a moment’s silence.
“No, he has been in Paris for a long while.”
The young woman seemed so sad after she had said this that Jacques regretted his question. The more he looked at his brother’s wife, the more he felt drawn toward her and disposed to love her; he did not doubt that Edouard had said nothing of his meeting with him.
“She would not have turned me away,” he said to himself; “with such gentleness in the features and the voice, a person cannot have a hard and unfeeling heart. Edouard alone is guilty. But I will not tell her; I should distress her to no purpose; and, besides, I have no intention of going near the ingrate who spurned me.”