The sunshine, slanting through the low windows, bathed hands and knees, lean shanks and slippered feet, in mote-flecked streams of gold. It bathed anew rafters and ceiling-beam, as it had done at the same hour and season these last three hundred years; it played over the worm-eaten furniture, and lent transitory colour to the faded samplers on the walls, bringing into prominence one particular sampler, which depicted in silks Adam and Eve seated beneath the fatal tree, and recorded the fact that Marie Hochedé was seventeen in 1808 and put her “trust in God”; and the same ray kissed the check of that very Marie's son, who at the time her girlish fingers pricked the canvas belonged to the enviable myriads of the unthought-of and the unborn.
“Why, how cold you are, Cousin Louis,” said Mrs. Poidevin, taking his passive hand between her two warm ones, and feeling a chill strike from it through the violet kid gloves; “and in spite of all this sunshine too!”
“Ah, I'm not always in the sunshine,” said the old man; “not always, not always in the sunshine.” She was not sure that he recognised her, yet he kept hold of her hand and would not let it go.
“No; you are not always in de sunshine, because de sunshine is not always here,” observed Mrs. Tourtel in a reasonable voice, and with a side glance for the visitor.
“And I am not always here either,” he murmured, half to himself. He took a firmer hold of his cousin's hand, and seemed to gain courage from the comfortable touch, for his thin voice changed from complaint to command. “You can go, Mrs. Tourtel,” he said; “we don't require you here. We want to talk. You can go and set the tea-things in the next room. My cousin will stay and drink tea with me.”
“Why, my cert'nly! of course Mrs. Pedvinn will stay tea. P'r'aps you'd like to put your bonnet off in the bedroom, first, ma'am?”
“No, no,” he interposed testily, “she can lay it off here. No need for you to take her upstairs.”
Servant and master exchanged a mute look; for the moment his old eyes were lighted up with the unforeseeing, unveiled triumph of a child; then they fell before hers. She turned, leaving the room with noiseless tread; although a large-built, ponderous woman, she walked with the softness of a cat.
“Sit down here close beside me,” said Louis Renouf to his cousin, “I've something to tell you, something very important to tell you.” He lowered his voice mysteriously, and glanced with apprehension at window and door, squeezing tight her hand. “I'm being robbed, my dear, robbed of everything I possess.”
Mrs. Poidevin, already prepared for such a statement, answered complacently, “Oh, it must be your fancy, Cousin Louis. Mrs. Tourtel takes too good care of you for that.”