"I am mademoiselle. You go first, Marie-Louise."
But Marie-Louise insisted on yielding to her. "We will come back for you."
Coming back, they found Eve in an irritable temper. "He told me—nothing."
"I told you what you did not want to hear. But I told you the truth."
"I don't believe in such things." Eve was lofty. Her cold eyes challenged the Oriental. "I don't believe you know anything about it."
"If Mademoiselle will write it down——" He was fat and puffy, but he had a sort of large dignity which ignored her rudeness. "If Mademoiselle will write it down, she will not say—next year—'I do not believe.'"
She shivered. "I wish I hadn't come. Dicky boy, let's go and play. Pip and Marie-Louise can stay if they like it. I don't."
When Marie-Louise had had her imagination once more fed on poets, kings, and previous incarnations, she and Pip went forth to seek the others.
"I wonder what he told Eve?" Pip speculated.
Marie-Louise spoke with shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would marry you—only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in reaching for a star she would stumble on a diamond."