"Dear Mariana," I answered, showing myself at the end of the little pier, "push out a boat and you can kiss me for it. My father says you may. Also send Jeanne quickly, for she and I can row so well together."
"It is that rascal of an English student, Monsieu' Aügoose from Gobelet. Well, I might have guessed. Yet it is not playtime at St. André that I have heard. I shall have you sent back and whipped. What, they do not whip at St. André? Ah, it is no wonder, then, that you young people wax so impertinent. If only you were my boy, I should not call upon Père Félix to help me. No, no—I would——" and the old lady, smacking one hard hand upon the other, conveyed her meaning exactly.
"Send Jeanne," I repeated, taking no notice of her pantomime.
"Send Jeanne," she imitated my college-trained voice, "Jeanne—Jeanne—it is always Jeanne!"
"Perhaps," I ventured, "when you were Jeanne's age it was always 'Mariana'! I'll wager that more people than Père Félix called you that in those days, petite mère!"
"Here comes Jeanne at last," she called, so that I could hear. "Do not put up with his insolence, Jeanne. He is a spoilt schoolboy, nothing more."
Jeanne stepped sagely into the skiff, with a foot so light and practised that the frail craft hardly quivered in the water. She was a tall, dark girl with a supple figure, both light and well-rounded, remarkably Diana-ish in a land where the women, save a few, are inclined to shortness, and in addition are already overshadowed by the stoutness which inevitably overtakes them after marriage.
Jeanne Félix received us without the least embarrassment into her boat. When I mentioned my friend's name in introducing him, there was one rapid up-and-down flicker of the drooping eyelashes, a flash of velvet eyes, and then without a word or a salutation she handed me the bow oar as if we had parted only the night before.
When we landed on the neat little embarcadère, below the Restaurant Sambre-et-Meuse, Madame Félix had vanished. I knew her to be already busy with the menu of our dinner, a matter which, in spite of her abuse of me, she would entrust to nobody.
There was a great chestnut tree before the door, and though the month was January, my pocket thermometer registered 62° Fahrenheit in our shadowed nook.