They met with enough frequency for her, if not for him. Their encounters took place between her duties aloft at the keyboard under the successive tiers of bells and his intervals of prowling among his mules.
Sometimes he found her sewing in the parlour—she could have gone to her own room,[pg 185] of course; sometimes he encountered her in the corridor, in the street, in the walled garden behind the inn, where with basket and pan she gathered vegetables in season.
There was a stone seat out there, built against the southern wall, and in the shadowed coolness of it she sometimes shelled peas.
During such an hour of liberty from the bell-tower he found the dark-eyed little mistress of the bells sorting various vegetables and singing under her breath to herself the carillon music of Josef Denyn.
"Tray chick, mademoiselle," he said, with a cheerful self-assertion, to hide the embarrassment which always assailed him when he encountered her.
"You know, Monsieur Burley, you should not say 'très chic' to me," she said, shaking her pretty head. "It sounds a little familiar and a little common."
"Oh," he exclaimed, very red. "I thought it was the thing to say."
She smiled, continuing to shell the peas, then, with her sensitive and slightly flushed[pg 186] face still lowered, she looked at him out of her dark blue eyes.
"Sometimes," she said, "young men say 'très chic.' It depend on when and how one says it."
"Are there times when it is all right for me to say it?" he inquired.