“O petit père! it’s nothing,” she cried eagerly, smitten with remorse by his look of anguish. “It’s not worth being unhappy about; only I never thought of it before, and now I’m afraid it can’t be helped. They will ask me to dance, and I don’t know how.”
“Mon Dieu! it is true. We should have thought of that. It was very heedless of us all. But there must be a master here who could give thee some lessons, my child. We will speak to Miss Merrywig. Stay, where’s my hat? There is no time to be lost.”
But Franceline checked him. “Petit père, I should be ashamed to get a master now; every one would know about it and laugh at me; all the young girls would make such fun of me.”
“What dances dost thou want to dance?” inquired her father, knitting his brows, as if searching some forgotten clew in the background of memory; “I dare say I could recall the minuet de la cour a little, if that would help thee.”
“I never hear them speak of it. I don’t think they dance that now; only quadrilles and waltzes,” said Franceline.
“Ah! quadrilles were after my day; but the valse à trois temps I knew once upon a time. Come and let us see if I cannot remember it.”
They went into the dining-room, pushed the table and chairs into a corner, and M. de la Bourbonais, fixing his spectacles as a preliminary step, put himself into position; his right foot a little in advance, his eye-brows very much protruded, and his head bent forward; he made the first steps with hesitation, then more boldly, assisting his memory by humming the tune of an old waltz.
Angélique, who was spinning in the room overhead, came down to see what the table and chairs were making all this clatter about, and burst in on a singular spectacle: her master pirouetting to the tune of un, deux, trois! round the eight-feet square apartment, while Franceline, squeezed against the wall, held up her skirt so as to afford a full view of her shabby little boots, and tried to execute the same evolutions in a space of one foot square.
“Papa is teaching me to waltz,” explained the pupil, not looking up, but keeping her eyes stuck on the professor’s feet lest she should miss the thread of their discourse.
“Well, to be sure! To think of Monsieur le Comte’s remembering his steps at this time of day! What a wonderful memory monsieur has!” was Angélique’s admiring comment.