At breakfast I found myself in plain favour; I had made good my boast and shielded the house from the Black Abbé. Yvonne met my eager looks with a baffling lightness. She was all gay courtesy to me, but there was that in her face which well dashed my hopes. Some faint encouragement, indeed, I drew from the thought that her pallor (which became her wonderfully) seemed to tell the tale of a sleepless night. Had she, then, lain awake, wearily reproaching herself, while I slept like a clod? If so, my punishment was not long delayed. Before the breakfast was over I was in a fever of despairing solicitude. At last I achieved a moment’s speech with Yvonne while the others were out of earshot.
“This morning,” said I, “in the apple-orchard, by an old tree which I shall all my life remember, I am to read you those verses, am I not? That was your decree.”
She faced me with laughter in her eyes, but the eyes dropped in spite of her, and the colour came a little back to her cheeks.
“I decree otherwise this morning,” she said, in a voice whose lightness was not perfect. “I am busy to-day, and shall not hear your poems at all, unless you read them to us this evening.”
“I will read them to you alone,” I muttered, “who alone are the source of them, or I will burn them at once!”
“Don’t burn them,” she said, flashing one radiant glance at me.
“Then when may I read them to you?” I begged.
“When you are older, and a little wiser, and a great deal better,” she laughed, turning away with a finality in her air that convinced me my day was lost.
Putting my bravest face on my defeat, I said to Madame de Lamourie:
“If you will pardon me, Madame, I shall constrain myself and attend to certain duties in and about Grand Pré to-day. I must see the curé; and I have a commission to execute for the Sieur de Briart, which will take me perhaps as far as Pereau. In such case I shall not be back here before to-morrow noon.”