"Deux francs cinquante," she repeated with painful tension. The price agreed upon had probably been a franc or a franc fifty. The man counted out the change to the student and looked at his wife with admiration. St. Peter was so pleased with his flowers that it hadn't occurred to him to get more; but all his life he had regretted that he didn't buy two bunches, and push their fortunes a little further. He had never again found dahlias of such a beautiful colour, or so charmingly arranged with bright chestnut-leaves.
A moment later he was strolling down the hill, wondering to whom he could give his bouquet, when a pathetic procession filed past him through the rain. The girls of a charity school came walking two and two, in hideous dark uniforms and round felt hats without ribbon or bow, marshalled by four black-bonneted nuns. They were all looking down, all but one—the pretty one, naturally—and she was looking sidewise, directly at the student and his flowers. Their eyes met, she smiled, and just as he put out his hand with the bouquet, one of the sisters flapped up like a black crow and shut the girl's pretty face from him. She would have to pay for that smile, he was afraid. Godfrey spent his day in the Luxembourg Gardens and walked back to the Gare St. Lazare at evening with nothing but his return ticket in his pocket, very glad to get home to Versailles in time for the family dinner.
When he first went to live with the Thieraults, he had found Madame Thierault severe and exacting, stingy about his laundry and grudging about the cheese and fruit he ate for dinner. But in the end she was very kind to him; she never pampered him, but he could depend upon her. Her three sons had always been his dearest friends. Gaston, the one he loved best, was dead—killed in the Boxer uprising in China. But Pierre still lived at Versailles, and Charles had a business in Marseilles. When he was in France their homes were his. They were much closer to him than his own brothers. It was one summer when he was in France, with Lillian and the two little girls, that the idea of writing a work upon the early Spanish explorers first occurred to him, and he had turned at once to the Thieraults. After giving his wife enough money to finish the summer and get home, he took the little that was left and went down to Marseilles to talk over his project with Charles Thierault fils, whose mercantile house did a business with Spain in cork. Clearly St. Peter would have to be in Spain as much as possible for the next few years, and he would have to live there very cheaply. The Thieraults were always glad of a chance to help him. Not with money,—they were too French and too logical for that. But they would go to any amount of trouble and no inconsiderable expense to save him a few thousand francs.
That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons. On the voyage everything seemed to feed the plan of the work that was forming in St. Peter's mind; the skipper, the old Catalan second mate, the sea itself. One day stood out above the others. All day long they were skirting the south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered on their right, snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz. St. Peter lay looking up at them from a little boat riding low in the purple water, and the design of his book unfolded in the air above him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through.
It was late on Christmas afternoon when the Professor got back to the new house, but he was in such a happy frame of mind that he feared nothing, not even a family dinner. He quite looked forward to it, on the contrary. His wife heard him humming his favorite air from Matrimonio Segreto while he was dressing.
That evening the two daughters of the house arrived almost at the same moment. When Rosamond threw off her cloak in the hall, her father noticed that she was wearing her new necklace. Kathleen stood looking at it, and was evidently trying to find courage to say something about it, when Louie helped her by breaking in.
"And, Kitty, you haven't seen our jewels! What do you think? Just look at it."
"I was looking. It's too lovely!"
"It's very old, you see, the gold. What a work I had finding it! She doesn't like anything showy, you know, and she doesn't care about intrinsic values. It must be beautiful, first of all."
"Well, it is that, surely."