“Come!” she whispered a moment later, “I think we have escaped from those most terrible eyes.”
Creeping out, they made their way along a corridor that welcomed them with ever-increasing brightness until they stood before a passenger elevator. A moment later they stood in the clear bright light of late autumn afternoon.
Throwing back her chest, the little French girl, who for a moment was Pierre, drank in three deep breaths, then uttered a long-drawn:
“Wh-e-w!”
“This,” said Rosemary, extending her hand as she might had she been leaving a party, “has been delightful. So perfectly wonderful. Let’s do it again sometime.
“One more thing!” She whispered this. “They have never found my pearls. But it really does not matter, at least not very much. What are pearls among friends?”
Before Petite Jeanne could recover from her surprise she was gone.
“I suppose,” she sighed as she turned to go on her way, “that some people have many terrible adventures and want none, and some have none but want many. What a crazy, upside-down world this is, after all.”
She was well on her way home when a question, coming into her mind with the force of a blow, left her stunned.
“Why did Rosemary say: ‘The pearls have not been found. It does not matter?’