"YOU ARE MONSIEUR'S SON."
One lovely June afternoon Annette was sitting on the steps that led down from the veranda at Grey-Mount House. She was alone, and looked unusually pensive; indeed, there was a slight shade of melancholy on her expressive face. Annette had just remembered that it was on this very day last year that she had first seen monsieur. "A year ago—actually it is a year," she said to herself, "since I left the Rue St. Joseph! Oh, those days—how dark and narrow they seem beside my life now!" And Annette shuddered involuntarily as she remembered the close, dark room, the long, weary hours, the frugal, solitary meals, when the tired lace mender had finished her work.
But the next moment the old street, with its curiously gabled houses, vanished from her mental vision, and she took up a different thread of musing. "What could she have said last night to offend Mr. Frank so deeply? He had kept away from her all the evening, and this morning he had gone off with only a hurried good-bye, and without waiting for his button-hole bouquet, though it was all ready for him—the prettiest she had ever made."
It was this remembrance that had been tormenting Annette all day, and had spoiled the sunshine for her. She had left Louie and Nettie to finish their game with Lottie, because she was playing so badly; and, of course, that was Mr. Frank's fault, too.
Annette did so hate to hurt people; but, though she did not like to confess it even to herself (for she was very loyal to her friends), Mr. Frank had been so very touchy lately. He was always pulling her words to pieces and grumbling over them, and he never seemed quite satisfied with her. "I think I disappoint him terribly," she said to herself, plaintively. "And yet what have I said?" And here Annette tried painfully to recall her words. They had been talking very happily, Frank had been giving her an account of a walking-tour, and somehow the conversation had veered round to Dinan and monsieur. Perhaps he was a little bored with her praises of monsieur, for he suddenly frowned (and she had never seen him frown before), and said: "It is no use trying; I may as well give it up. I don't believe any man has a chance with you; you think of no one but my father."
"I think there is no man so good and wise as monsieur," she had replied, very innocently; and then, to her dismay, Mr. Frank had looked hurt, and became all at once quite silent.
"I do not understand young men," she said, as she laid her head on the pillow; "they are strange—very strange. Mr. Frank looks as though I had committed some crime. Friends ought not to quarrel for a word. To-morrow I will make him ashamed of himself. His bouquet shall be better than monsieur's."
Annette was quite happy as she prepared her little offering—she even smiled as she laid it aside. She was sure Frank saw it, though he took no notice; he always petitioned for one so humbly. But on this unlucky day he went out of the breakfast-room without a word; he was in the dog-cart beside his father as Annette crossed the hall, and his cold, uncompromising "Good-morning, Miss Ramsay!" left her no opening. The poor flowers were left to wither on the marble slab, and Annette, in rather a melancholy mood, settled to her practicing; but her scales were less perfect than usual. "What can it mean?" played the prelude to every exercise and study.
Annette had laid aside her mourning; she was in white this evening, and the cluster of dark roses at her throat suited her complexion admirably. Her pretty little head, with its dark, smooth plaits, was drooping slightly. Something in her attitude seemed to strike Frank as he crossed the lawn on his way to the house; he looked, hesitated, then looked again, and finally sauntered up to the veranda with a fine air of indifference.
"Do you know where Louie is, Miss Ramsay?"