“PIOTR”

MOONGLADE

A NOVEL

BY THE AUTHOR OF
The Martyrdom of an Empress

OFFICIER DE L’ORDRE DE L’INSTRUCTION
PUBLIQUE DE FRANCE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXV

Books by The Author of
“THE MARTYRDOM OF AN EMPRESS”

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1915
C-P

TO
A
WITH
EVERLASTING THOUGHTS

MOONGLADE

Moonglade upon the waters whitely lying;
Though the wind, shouting from the western verge,
Herdeth the huddled cloud-rack, flying—flying—
Glory still re-emergent, rift-descrying,
Spanneth the somber surge.
Moonglade, O Moonglade, heavenly calm and still,
Throned on the tossing manes unbroke to thill,
I know, beholding thee,
The storm will pass, and night upon the sea!

Moonglade the dark lanes of the forest keeping,
Soundless and silent, hearken as ye list;
Lakes of bejewelled vapor lowly sleeping,
And the long grasses from the surface peeping
Levelled of silver mist.
Moonglade, O Moonglade, that your Fates fulfil,
In your black forest-prison sweetly still,
I know, beholding thee,
Lights of the lost world, Faith and Purity!

Moonglade, empearled of flame unearthly, lying
Over the crystal plains of snow and light,
While the lost wind, of naked cold a-crying,
Shudders beneath the half-shut stars espying
Down from the steely night.
Moonglade, O Moonglade, heavenly calm and still,
Moulding to beauty bitterness and ill,
I know, beholding thee,
Yet is there strength, and truth and constancy!

Moonglade, a pale and forthright splendor, deeping
The mountain shadows on the river-flow,
Across the sullen flood’s resistless creeping—
Across the years, the wreckage and the weeping,
You stand, so let them go!
Moonglade, O Moonglade, that my heart doth fill,
Causeway to Avalon unchanging still,
I know that pass by thee,
The “bowery hollows, crowned with summer sea”!

1914.

M. M.

MOONGLADE

CHAPTER I

The Sphinx, prophetically sung
By Fable old, and ever young,
Is Beauty perilous, that stands
With eagle wings and taloned hands.

“Mademoiselle Seton is requested to come down to the parlor.”

The white-coiffed nun stood inside the door, waiting for the tall girl who at the words had briskly risen from the first rank of her fellow-pupils. She was older than any there, and her whole allure as she stepped forward betrayed a certain sense of superiority and conscious pride. Silently she followed Madame Marie-Immaculée along the stone-paved and arched passage leading to the broad, shallow stairs, her step as light and noiseless as thistle-down, rhythmed, as it were, to the musical tinkle of her leader’s great rosary. In the vaulted hall below she made a deep obeisance, and passed into the parloir, leaving the nun on the threshold, as is the rule.

The parloir of the Sacred Heart Convent at Bryn is a cheerful place, and was full of sun-rays that morning. Plants carefully tended showed their green leaves and bright blossoms on the window-sills behind the snowy sheerness of tightly drawn curtains, the old oaken furniture shone with numberless polishings, and a great silver-and-ivory crucifix fastened to the pale-gray wall gleamed benignantly above a jardinière filled with freshly gathered “votive” heathers. Blinking a little in all this brightness after the dimness of the corridor, the girl hesitated a second.

“Good morning, Laurence. Don’t you see me?” The voice was prim, exceedingly correct in enunciation, and high-bred in accent.

“Oh, is that you, Aunt Elizabeth?” the girl said, coming quietly forward, a cool hand outstretched. “When did you land?”

“Two hours ago, at Tréport. And I am here to take you back with me this evening.”

This was delivered much in the manner of a pronunciamiento, and the recipient thereof raised her eyebrows nervously.

“This evening!” she echoed. “Why so much haste, Aunt Elizabeth, pray?”

“Because you have been here four years, which is much longer than we wished you to remain,” the elder lady stated, tartly. “You are eighteen, and, being English, it is high time that you should become reaccustomed to British ways and manners.”

A quaint little smile drew up the corners of Laurence’s lips, but her eyes remained serious. She was a singularly beautiful girl, graceful of figure, dainty-featured, and gifted with an alabaster complexion and a wealth of chestnut hair that would have made even a plain woman attractive.

“You find me too Frenchified?” she queried, twisting the azure ribbon of her silver medal around her fingers—for she was an “Enfant de Marie,” and one of the model pupils of her convent-school.

“Ye-es,” hesitated Lady Seton, raising her lorgnette the better to study this “uncomfortable” niece. “Ye-e-s! I am afraid so, but we will soon alter all that!” And she let the lorgnette drop to the very end of its interminable amethyst-and-pearl chain. “You had better get your things ready as quickly as you can, Laurence,” she continued, “for neither your uncle nor the tide is wont to wait, and I shall come back for you at six o’clock sharp.”

“You crossed on the Phyllis, then?”

“Why, of course! What else would have landed us at Tréport?”

“I don’t know,” the girl indifferently replied.

Lady Seton shrugged one shoulder, not in the acceptedly Gallic way, which she would have condemned, but in a slightly contemptuous fashion.

“Be ready, bag and baggage, at a quarter to six, please, without fail. I’ll be glad to see you out of that ghastly black uniform—or whatever you call it! It is decidedly dowdy!”

Laurence laughed, smoothed the straight alpaca folds falling from shoulder to ankle, and glanced at her aunt quizzically.

“I am going to interview the Mother Superior,” pronounced the latter again, “and then I shall go, so that you may have an opportunity to take all the hysterical farewells you choose from your beloved friends here.”

Hysterical! Laurence laughed once more her low, mocking laugh, and effaced herself before the rangey form of her aunt as her British ladyship set off, under full sail, sweeping past Madame Marie-Immaculée—still pacing monotonously up and down the hall, out of hearing, but in full sight of the parloir door.

“Poor Mother Superior!” Laurence mused, with piously raised eyes. “Poor Mother Superior! I hope my delightful aunt will have nothing but edifying things to say of me; she is not overburdened with tact, as a rule!”

As she reascended the stairs she was suddenly met by a whirlwind of outstretched arms, flying golden hair, and skirts of alpaca like her own, which flung itself headlong upon her.

“Laurence! Laurence! Have they come for you already?... Oh! Oh, Laurence!” The breathless sentence ended abruptly in a burst of whole-hearted sobs as Marguerite de Plenhöel clung desperately about her comrade’s neck.

“Voyons, mon petit,” consoled Laurence, keeping her equilibrium with wonderful ease under the circumstances. “Sois raisonnable!”

But the fifteen-year-old evidently was disinclined to listen to reason, at least just then, for she went on choking and gasping, and entreating betweentimes: “Don’t go away, Loris. Don’t leave me! Don’t!”

“Hush! Hush, little one! Hush! Let’s slip into the garden. They’ll hear you if we stay here!”

“We—ca—n’t—can’t go in—into ... the garden—with—out—permis—sion,” Marguerite convulsively objected.

But Laurence was firm. “But, yes, we can. There’s nobody about now. Come quick!” she commanded, half dragging, half carrying Marguerite down-stairs again. And thus at last they reached a small postern opening from the north wing, and stopped only when, still clasping each other, they stepped into the wonderful allée of lindens that skirts the cloisters on that side of the building.

The sun filtering through the pale leafage made swaying spots of pink copper all over the decorously raked gravel; the heliotropes and old-fashioned verbenas and rose-geraniums filling the borders smelled sweet to heaven, and in a near-by bosquet of laburnum a green finch sang to burst his little throat (à se rompre la gorge).

Marguerite—“Gamin” to her intimates—instantly became quieter. With a gesture that was very youthful and very impatient she pushed the tumbled gold out of her big blue eyes, still brimful of tears, and stamped her narrow foot.

“Don’t tell me it’s true!” she cried. “Don’t, Loris! It would be too terrible!”

Miss Seton—the Hon. Laurence Seton—in all the plenitude of her admirably controlled faculties, stared at the delightful tomboy beside her.

“It is true, my poor ‘Gamin,’” she serenely stated, checking another outburst with a slight recoil of her supple body. “My excellent uncle and aunt have resolved that I shall go with them to ‘la triste Angleterre,’ and so to the sad England I must go. Voilà!”

“But when—when?” demanded the quivering little creature. “When?”

Laurence hesitated. To tell the “Gamin” that only a few hours remained before her final departure from Bryn would destroy all her chances of making her preparations in peace; for this, alas! was a half-holiday, and Marguerite would be free to follow her about everywhere. To tell a frank fib was out of the question, of course. Laurence always avoided direct lies, so she took refuge in a simple evasion.

“How can I tell exactly? Such queer people as my relatives are apt to be unreliable,” she equivocated. “You don’t know my uncle Bob and my aunt Elizabeth, luckily for you, ‘Gamin.’ One can never guess what is going to happen next when they come on the scene!”

“They must be atrocious—abominable!” snapped poor Marguerite, her dark eyebrows meeting in a furious frown above her exquisitely arched little nose.

“N-no, not that; merely very tiresome and authoritative—insular to a terrible extent! He, as I have often told you, is a yachtsman above, before, after, and during everything else; by no means unkind, but as stubborn as a whole troop of mules. She—well, she’s Elizabethan; not kindly nor good-looking, but worse! Brick-red morally and physically, without any luster or brilliancy, fond of absolute power, narrow-minded, and—oh, well, quite unendurable.”

“O-o-o-o-h!” gasped Marguerite. “Oh ... o ... o ... o ... h!”

“I am their ward,” Laurence continued. “They are my omnipotent guardians, and I can never hope to get rid of them, for I am a beggar, living on their rather acid bounty. Do you understand, petit ‘Gamin’?”

No, petit “Gamin” did not understand. There was something askew in that speech, somehow, something that grated upon her, though just what it was she could not have told. She therefore remained silent, her eyes fixed upon two yellow butterflies chasing each other round and round a clump of blue hortensias artistically grouped at the corner of the cloister beneath the leaden rain-spout, whose frequent libations kept those gorgeous globes of bloom from reverting to their original creamy pink.

“A beggar!” the child said at last. “A beggar!... Then why don’t you come and live with me at Plenhöel instead of with them in England?” There was extraordinary contempt in the way she said “them.” “I have only another year to stay here,” she passionately pleaded, “and every single thing I own will be half yours, Loris darling—every single thing!”

Eyes and hands uplifted, she gazed imploringly at Laurence, and for an instant a softer expression flitted across the latter’s somewhat sulky face.

“They would not let me do that—at any rate, not until I come of age,” she asserted. “No, decidedly not.... And, what’s more, I would not accept charity from your people, who are no relations of mine.”

Marguerite looked at her friend in positive amazement. “Charity!” she indignantly remonstrated; and then violently she cast herself prone upon the green border of the allée, kicking her tiny toes into the turf. “Charity indeed!” she angrily cried from within the shelter of her intertwined arms. “Charity—to you!”

“Mademoiselle de Plenhöel!” a voice expostulated behind her; and Mademoiselle de Plenhöel regained her feet with amazing promptness, crimson with confusion, to face the most dreaded of her educators, Madame Marie-Antoinette, whose rigid manners and severe cast of countenance were the iron mask of a heart unsuspectedly tender.

“What does this behavior mean?” she now demanded, standing like a black statue of reproof within a yard of the culprit, her white hands folded within her wide sleeves.

“Pardon me, Madame Marie-Antoinette,” Marguerite stammered, “but you ... you see, Laurence is g-going away ... soon!” Here tears of mingled rage and distress began again to run from beneath the heavy, drooping lashes!

An almost imperceptible wave of delicate color rose to the nun’s still features and wiped twenty years from them! She, too, had known those great despairs of early youth—far greater ones, perhaps—and it was in an altogether altered voice that she replied.

“I am sorry to see you so unhappy, Marguerite,” she said, drawing nearer to her, “but such outbursts of feeling are not seemly, my child; besides, they prove nothing—nothing at all—and are—er—vulgar!” She gave a little cough, and went on, equably: “Laurence has her duties as you have yours. So come with me now, at least until you have controlled yourself”; and as an afterthought she concluded, “By the way, you are both in contravention, for you are well aware that the garden and park are forbidden ground to you when unaccompanied by one of us.”

Marguerite reverently touched a fold of the nun’s robe. “I am sorry,” she whispered very mournfully; “I am sorry!”

For a moment Laurence had been watching the picture made by the “Gamin” in this unusually contrite mood, looking, in fact, quite like a little saint in the discreet sun-shower beneath the trees that dappled her slim black gown and formed a bright nimbus around her lovely lowered head. Twice she opened her lips to speak, but refrained. Then, courtesying deeply to the nun, she walked demurely indoors, where, however, as soon as she found herself alone, she raced at top speed up the stairs, thinking, as she went: “Better so. Outbursts are—are—vulgar, as Madame Marie-Antoinette has so sapiently remarked, and our poor ‘Gamin’ is still so very impulsive—so impossible to convince that I’d sooner not try it!”

CHAPTER II

Where first the wave, in long unrest
Rolled from the glamour of the West,
Breaks with the voice of Fate along
The shores of Legend and of Song.

The sea was beating into unbroken foam at the foot of the towering cliff—an uninterrupted front of granite, quite unscalable except at narrow clefts four and five miles apart, which nobody would attempt except at low water, when a precarious path of shingle is laid bare between that grim rampart and the lip of the tide. A summer storm had raged for two days and nights along this terrible coast, and now, although the leadenness of the sky was thinning here and there to patches of faded turquoise, the waves, still savagely churned by the wind, were piling beds of semi-solid spume far above the ragged margin of the inner Bay of Plenhöel.

From the stone terrace of the Castle the sight would have been awe-inspiring to any but its inhabitants, hardened through generation after generation to such spectacles and such sensations. To the right of the fortress-like building a wall of spindrift whirling up an embayment of the falaise shut off all view of the coast to the eastward; to the left and in front chaos reigned supreme in a fathomless gulf, while behind it miles of pine forest stretched to the crest of the table-land in endless tossing manes of somber green.

Five hundred feet of sheer cliff about which thousands of gulls flew screaming in and out of the roaring gusts of the gale, and down-shore the intermittent boom of a souffleur overtoning by many cavernous notes the great voices of sky and sea.

The library at Plenhöel is one of the most pleasing places imaginable. Long ago it had been a guard-room, where the officers of the garrison watched the offing from the tunnel-like window-embrasures, and the pikes of halberdiers resounded upon the granite-flagged floor. Some time after the Chouan wars it was transformed into an eminently “living” apartment, paneled in carved oak, book-lined on three sides, and pierced by many tall French windows that open upon a broad balcony of wonderfully wrought stone.

In one of the aforesaid embrasures that tempestuous morning the still, gracile silhouette of Marguerite de Plenhöel was outlined against the background of sea and cloud. She had grown a little since a year, but it seemed evident that she would never be either a tall or an “imposing” woman. But what could one not forgive in so lovely a little creature who, with her square shoulders and slim, round waist, looked wholesome and strong as any sand-poppy; whose delicately oval face was so full of happy life, from the deep-set blue eyes to the tender mouth, the patrician arch of the nose, and the obstinate little chin dented by a tantalizing fossette? The crinkly silkiness of her hair—that crowning beauty of hers—now piled upon her head in rebellious masses, shone even in the fog-dimmed light as she bent forward to gaze fervently through the panes, breathing on and rubbing them again and again to free them from their misted opaqueness.

She had been home for good a couple of weeks only, and greeted the convulsions of nature as a treat especially prepared for her; for now and then she clapped her hands and sketched a merry jig-step or two on the polished floor, evidently in applause of so stirring a scene. So absorbed, indeed, was she in her contemplation, her lovely face flattened now against the glass, that she did not hear a door unclose and shut behind her. She was counting aloud for the seventh fateful wave that all true-born ocean folk hold in so profound a respect.

“One, two, three, four, five, six ...” she called, as if summoning the crowning surge in unconquerable impatience.

“Seven!” said a voice immediately at her side, and she whirled about on one toe to find herself confronted by a very tall man who was smiling amusedly.

“Basil!” she exclaimed. “Cousin Basil! Where did you jump from?”

“From the cliff path, which I don’t recommend as a peaceful choice of promenade just now,” he replied, calmly; but his fine gray eyes, nevertheless, held a suggestion of the pleasing battle he had just fought against the tempest.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she reproached, with an adorable pout. “I would have liked so much to come with you.”

“Little girls, my cousin,” he answered, gravely, “should not be risked on the edge of draughty precipices.”

The “Gamin” frowned. She was too young as yet to enjoy being called a little girl, and the riposte came at once.

“Where old gentlemen are safe, younger people may surely go!” she said, mischievously.

“Old gentleman ... hummm ... m! That’s rather hard on me, isn’t it, dear cousin mine?”

“Hard, why?” she retorted. “How old are you, anyhow?” And, standing on the very points of her tiny slippers, she pointed at his temples with two accusing fingers.

“One, two, three, four, five, six ... silver threads among the bronze,” she misquoted.

“And seven!” he coolly admitted, looking smilingly down at her. “Seven or more, what matters? I am thirty-four, you know, my little cousin.”

“What matters indeed! You have enough privileges already, without expecting to remain always young.”

“Privileges! You surprise me!”

“Certainly,” she insisted. “Aren’t you a great Prince, a Serene-Highness—just as in the fairy-tales? Haven’t you huge, big estates in Russia and the Crimea, villas in the south of France, fortins in the Caucasus, mines in Siberia, besides loads and loads of money, jewels, picture-galleries, a private band of musicians, acres of hothouses, horses, stud-farms? A regular Marquis de Carabas, that’s what you are!”

She paused for lack of breath, and once more he laughed.

“You overwhelm me, ma cousine,” he mocked; “but since I am old, quite an old gentleman, you see ... what are these manifold gifts to me?”

“Old! Oh, not so very old, after all!” she suddenly contradicted. “Fortunately you are handsome, and very, very tall. Whew ... ew! You are tall! I love that! I despise small men. They’re always barking and fussing, like black-and-tans. Don’t you think so?”

“Your knowledge is indeed extensive, ‘Gamin,’” he praised. “Yet it is scarcely necessary to be a giant in order to possess a kindly temper. I have met—”

“Never mind what you have met,” she interrupted. “I know that you are good-tempered, and six foot four inches. That’s enough proof of what I said just now.”

“Thank you!” he began, dryly. But in one clean bound she cleared the space between the window and a ponderous oaken bench, upon which she perched herself, her feet ten inches from the immense rug covering all the middle of the room. “And now,” she stated, “I must be reasonable, and grown-up, and all the rest of it, so that the person who first exhorted me to listen to reason may not find me lacking in that desirable quality.”

“Is there really a person bold enough to preach reason to you?” he commenced; but she silenced him by an eminently peremptory gesture.

“Listen!” she admonished. “Do you hear wheels?”

“Wheels?” he questioned, sincerely astonished. “In this storm?”

“And why not? Why shouldn’t people travel in a storm when they are not imprisoned, as I am?”

“You are a prisoner?” Prince Basil asked, with amazement.

“Of course I am. Papa—the dear Saints of Brittany bless him—has decreed—decreed, you understand—‘J’ai décrété’ was what he said—he loves such sentences—that he would go alone to fetch my Loris at the station. You will agree with him, I am sure, ‘little girls’ should always be left at home. Eh?”

“What is ‘your Loris,’ if I may be so indiscreet as to ask, petite cousine?”

“What? You mean who, I suppose. She is the most beautiful girl in the world—an English ‘professional beauty,’ they say. She was at the Sacré-Cœur with me, and she loved me—yes, she loved me, though she played me a mean trick once; but it wasn’t her fault, poor dear! I’ve never seen her since. And just imagine, her ogres of uncle and aunt have condescended to let her spend a month with us here—a whole month—thirty days—no, thirty-one, as this is the last day of June.”

“This promises to be interesting,” Basil remarked. “A gloriously beautiful maiden oppressed by avuncular ogres, and coming all the way from perfidious Albion to charm the natives of ancient Armorica! It sounds very well, when one comes to think of it!”

The “Gamin,” who had pulled from the pocket of her white serge frock a handful of hazelnuts, and was joyously cracking them one after another between her short white teeth, laughed and nearly choked herself.

“You have,” she asserted, as soon as she could speak, “a funny way of expressing yourself, Cousin Basil. Why don’t you add that a handsome Prince Charming came from much farther off yet, to do likewise?”

“Again? Vous y tenez décidément, ma cousine! Handsome is as handsome does, you know, and as yet I am not conscious of having behaved in any very remarkable way since my arrival!”

Marguerite raised her shoulders to the level of her ears, threw a handful of nut-shells in the bronze waste-paper holder at her side, and jumped from her lofty seat.

“It must be nearly eleven,” she cried in sudden alarm. “We’ll miss it all if we don’t go down-stairs now, at once. Come quick.”

“Miss what?” the impassive Prince demanded, slowly rising from the deep arm-chair where he had established himself.

But she had already glissaded to the head of the stairs, and it took all he could accomplish with his long legs to overtake her before she had quite succeeded in breaking her pretty nails, in endeavoring to open one of the tall windows giving on the north terrace.

“Leave that to me. The wind is straight against it. Wait, won’t you, please?” he pleaded, his hand over both of hers, for she was still struggling manfully with the complicated fastening.

“I’m very strong,” she panted. “I’ve done it lots of times.”

Evidently she was very strong, for the window suddenly gave way and, had it not been for Basil’s weight, would have knocked her flat. But little did she care for such slight contretemps. With a ringing war-whoop she raced out, her hair—instantly blown from its restraining combs by the whistling blast—streaming in clouds behind her, her skirts flying back from her slim ankles, and danced wildly toward the carven parapet.

Basil, hastily securing the window from the outside, ran after her, afraid that she would really be whirled by the back-draught over the balustrade to the causeway below. He was laughing helplessly at the extraordinary antics of this queer little being who bewitched him, but when he caught up with her he took firm hold upon her arm.

“You imp!” he shouted, for the hurly-burly was such that he could not hear his own voice, nor her reply, for that matter; but it was not a very decorous one, to judge by the roguish sparkle of her eyes. However, she did not shake off his hand, which quite surprised him, and soon they were leaning side by side against a beautiful mediæval gargoyle hewn from the stone wall of the terrace, and at that moment disgorging the downpour of the morning hours.

Following her excited glance, he saw, away down at the foot of the causeway, a four-in-hand, fiercely beaten by the wind as it labored up the steep incline.

“Les voilà! Les voilà!” Marguerite shrieked, quite beside herself with delight. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

The words were flung in Basil’s teeth by the tempest. But he had already recognized—his sight being unusually keen—his cousin de Plenhöel handling the ribbons, and seen that a slender feminine form, tightly cloaked and hooded, was sitting beside him. Far behind the equipage a fourgon was following, with the maid and luggage.

“Oh, look at the horses’ manes!” shrieked Marguerite, pointing to the drag, now almost immediately beneath. “They are blown all sideways. Oh dear! How funny!”

“And what about yours?” Basil laughed, vainly attempting to capture in both hands the flying silk of her glorious hair; but with another of her acrobatic bounds she darted from his side, turned the corner like a blown feather, and disappeared into the Cour-d’Honneur, where he hastened to join her, bullied by the wind and with less decorum than was his wont.

Great black clouds were once more piling up in the sky, and as the horses turned into the wide paved space a few enormous drops of rain began to fall.

Fortunately here there was some shelter from the storm, and it became possible to reassume some dignity of demeanor, if one felt so inclined. Marguerite, however, had no such cares, and as soon as her father—Le Beau Plenhöel, known since his early youth by the eminently unpretentious sobriquet of “Antinoüs”—had accomplished a masterly turn around the central fountain and brought his mettlesome team to a stand at the foot of the perron, she had clambered on the near wheel and, lifting herself to the box, was hugging Laurence Seton like a bear.

The Marquis de Plenhöel burst into hearty laughter and glanced indulgently at Basil, standing ready to help the two girls down. The grooms had jumped to the horses’ heads, where they now remained, like twin wax figures incapable of movement or expression, under the pelting shower.

“Mais, mon ‘Gamin,’ let her get down!” Plenhöel called. “We’ll all be drenched to the bone.” And then only Marguerite regretfully leaped into his arms, making it possible for Basil to assist Laurence to the ground. Under such circumstances the introduction was necessarily quite unconventional, and, driven indoors by the rain now flooding in torrents from the leaden gutters overhead and ricochetting in the liveliest fashion from the steps, Marguerite and Laurence ran off without further ado.

Pulling off his long mackintosh and soaked driving-gloves, Plenhöel turned to his cousin:

“A dramatic entrée!” he said, grinning, and displaying under his blond mustache teeth of a whiteness and regularity worthy of a boy of twenty. “With the ‘Gamin’ one can always expect something unforeseen,” he added, leading the way to his den. “Here, have a dash of cognac, Basil. You look almost as pumped as I am!” And he pushed the tantalus toward his relative. “It will sharpen our appetites for luncheon, too.”

Basil quietly possessed himself of a very easy chair, and, declining the spirits by a gesture, lighted a cigarette.

“Who and what is that ethereal apparition who is throwing our ‘Gamin’ into such convulsions of joy?” he asked, lazily following with his eyes a ring of smoke floating toward the caissoned ceiling.

“Hum-um!” “Antinoüs” replied, setting down his little glass and drying his mustache on his handkerchief. “A very beautiful person, as you may have seen.”

“I did not see. She was cowled like a monk, and, save for a bit of resolute chin and the gleam of an interesting pair of eyes—”

“Oh, she’s beautiful; no doubt about that, my boy; but as far as I have been able to judge—which is not much, I admit—she is scarcely the sort I would have accused the ‘Gamin’ of turning into an idol.”

“Accuse is severe!” Basil remarked, knocking the ashes from his cigarette with the tip of his little finger. “What’s amiss with her? You don’t mean that she’s a dark filly?”

“No....” “Antinoüs” hesitated. “No—but hard in the mouth, and a bit sultry in temperament, I should say. Of course it is hard to judge, where the Anglo-Saxon ‘Miss Independence’ is concerned; but this one has been admirably brought up by our good ladies of the Sacré-Cœur; and moreover I understand that all her life she has been pruned, and prismed, and molded, and clipped by a dragon of an aunt—an ex-beauty—now rather long in the tooth, who, it appears, is not often inclined to joke. But still the finished product of her labors inspires me with no extravagant amount of confidence.”

Basil gazed thoughtfully at his kinsman. He knew him to be a connoisseur, and a fastidious one, at that, for all the women of his family were, or had been, renowned for their loveliness. Moreover, married at twenty-two to one of Brittany’s fairest daughters, he had been left a widower fourteen months later, when Marguerite was born. Be it said to his praise, he had never dreamt of giving his dear “Gamin” a stepmother; but when all was said and done he was now barely thirty-eight, extraordinarily good-looking, and eminently disinclined by nature to keep his eyes closed when beauty was about.

“Not bridle wise?” Basil smiled up at Antinoüs. “According to your lights, at least?”

“Bridle wise! Who d’you take me for?” the Marquis protested. “You don’t fancy I’d try to flirt”—he said “fleureter”—“with a damsel under my protection, do you? Besides,” he added, naïvely, “she’s not my style ... not a bit of it!”

“Heaven be thanked, then,” Basil gravely replied. “We can henceforth rest in peace!”

Plenhöel burst out laughing and clapped his cousin on the back. “There’s the bell. Let’s to table, unbeliever!” And he drew back to let Basil pass out of the room before him.

A surprise awaited Basil in the dining-room as he came down, after hurriedly brushing his hair to an admirable smoothness. By the opposite door Marguerite and Laurence were entering, and for the first time in his affectionate acquaintance with the “Gamin” he completely forgot her presence, for the lithe figure beside her and overtopping her by half a head almost took his breath away. Graceful as it is granted but few to be, “Miss Independence,” as “Antinoüs” had called her—was, outwardly, at least, perfection. Her long hazel eyes had that slight droop at the outer edges of the lids which makes so much for beauty and expression; her small, well-cut mouth and high-bred features, the oval of her jasmine-white face, and her coronal of warmly auburn braids, made up an altogether uncommon ensemble. Clad in vaporous lace-incrusted batiste of a creamy tint, melting into that of her exquisite skin, a knot of deep-red carnations carelessly thrust in her softly folded satin belt was the only touch of color about her, and Basil’s eyes very nearly transgressed the dictates of good form as he looked at her. Truly, Plenhöel was difficult to please, he thought, taking his seat beside “the Marvel,” as he already inwardly named her.

The poor “Gamin,” although her rebellious tresses were now as neat as Laurence’s own, her crumpled serge replaced by a pale-pink linen of irreproachable chic, remained during the entire meal unobserved by her big cousin; but she, nevertheless, filled her place as mistress of the house excellently well, and with a little air of importance that sat very prettily upon her extreme youthfulness. However, “Antinoüs,” always immensely proud of his daughter, seemed lost in contemplation of this charming vis-à-vis, so that at first the conversational ball rolled uninterruptedly between the two others; but as a matter of fact he was thinking of some retrievers that were coming from England that week to add the charm of their thoroughbredness to his kennels—already too expensive, for, in the modern sense of the word, at least, he was not what is termed a very wealthy man.

After luncheon, the storm having not as yet abated, the little party went to what is called at Plenhöel the Galerie des Ancêtres—a particularly attractive apartment in which to spend a wet afternoon. Hung with ancient tapestries and decorated with armor of the best period, with an antique banner drooping here and there along the paneling above a row of knights’ stalls of heavy carven wood, this, together with a succession of splendid family portraits, preserved there the touch of the long ago, for the rest of the furnishings were amusingly heterogeneous. The great room terminated at both ends in monumental fireplaces. Fronting one of these was a huge billiard-table, balanced by a Pleyel grand piano, and opposite, to one side of the other chimneypiece, a large-sized organ was flanked by enormous palms in bronze tubs, while the rest of the thirty-odd yards of space was most variously occupied—tables great and small, loaded with albums, books, magazines, and flower-filled vases; a collection of sofas, pouffs and piled-up cushions; and many arm-chairs and benches, ranging from angular Gothic shapes to the most approved and lazy forms of to-day.

Here one could smoke, read, nap, or play games of all sorts without let or hindrance, since, besides the billiards, a set of graces, a game of bagatelle, a chess-board, a Dutch top flanked by its individual paraphernalia, and even a jeu de petits chevaux were ready to hand.

To-day, however, a strange and unaccustomed atmosphere seemed to pervade this home-like and delightful retreat. Basil, perhaps exhausted by his unwonted loquacity at lunch, had fallen silent, and stood near one of the windows, gazing dreamily at the soupy gravel drive and the dripping trees. Antinoüs, sunk to the shoulders into the mellowness of a brocaded smoking-chair, pulled pensively at his mustache, his eyes idly wandering over the pages of a two-days-old number of the Gazette de France, and neither of them said a word. Still, Marguerite and her guest, sitting side by side on an ottoman placed in a far-off embrasure, made up for it by chattering like magpies—but sotto voce, so that their “confidences” should not be overheard. In truth, their “confidences” had so far remained completely one-sided. Laurence spoke in a sufficiently lively fashion, but revealed nothing of her own doings and thoughts. That she was drawing out the “Gamin” with superior skill would have been patent to a less simple little soul than Marguerite’s.

“But,” Miss Seton said at last, “you never told me that you have Russian relatives.” And her eyes slid a furtive glance in the direction of Prince Basil.

“Didn’t I?” Marguerite laughed. “I never thought of it in our convent days. You see, I did not know my cousin Basil then quite as well as I do now. It is like this. My grandfather’s sister, Anne de Plenhöel, married Pierre Palitzin, and became Basil’s grandmother. Am I expressing myself clearly?”

“Very clearly. And is Prince Basil an only child?” Laurence spoke in the tone of one who desires, out of mere politeness, to keep up a rather boring dialogue.

“Oh dear, no! He has the most exquisite sister. She married another relative of ours, Jean de Salvières. It’s quite a mixed affair, those family ties of ours, like a Neapolitan ice, pink, and green, and mauve, and lemon, in stripes.”

“De Salvières.... The Duke?” mused Laurence, aloud.

“Yes! The Duke, of course! Do you know him, Laurence? He has a château on the Normandy cliffs—the château—le plus beau château de France, I believe honestly; and so picturesque, with its machicolations, its keep, its dungeons, and turrets and towers! It looks as if Gustave Doré had built it. Also Basil has two brothers—the youngest, who is in the Corps-des-Pages of the Czar, and then André, an officer in the Chevaliers-Gardes, all white and gold and silver, and taller even than Basil, with big blue eyes, a yellow mustache, a complexion as rosy as a baby’s, a—”

“He must be lovely,” interrupted Laurence, “and look as if he had rolled about on a rainbow, your cousin André.”

Marguerite stared. The tone rather than the words surprised her. This quaint little being, still at the tender age of easy laughter and easy tears, hated mockery when it was directed toward what she loved and honored. Her slangy childish tongue, so apt to speak at random, never gave its assistance to unkind sayings, and for the second time since they knew each other Laurence felt that she had struck a false note. Indeed, the “Gamin” looked at that minute like a small game-cock of ruffled plumage and sparkling eyes.

“I beg your pardon. I did not know a harmless joke could offend you,” Laurence apologized.

“It did not offend me!” stoutly declared Marguerite. “But—I don’t know why—I can’t bear to have my people laughed at.”

“Your people! You are so excessively and exclusively a Bretonne, that one cannot realize your claiming kin with Muscovites.”

“When I say my people I mean all who belong to me, which includes, of course, the Palitzins.”

Again Laurence, not quite at her keenest on this occasion, overstepped the bounds of prudence, certainly those of Breton delicacy—which are finely drawn—for, piqued at Marguerite’s plainness of speech—perhaps at something else, too—she quickly retorted:

“I am inclined to believe that you are in love with Prince Basil!”

Marguerite’s blue eyes widened, her pretty lips straightened, and she rose to her feet.

“I am sure papa must be fainting with ennui,” she said in a level voice. “Let’s go and challenge him to a game of billiards. It is his hour for play!” And she glided off with the lithe grace which betrays great strength concealed in satin softness.

“The cut direct!” Laurence muttered, following her, and smiling in a fashion that strove, quite unsuccessfully, to be pleasingly indulgent. “Bother these Breton prudes! I’ll have to mend my paces here, it seems,” she muttered, as she crossed the gallery.

CHAPTER III

If the tongue’s a consuming fire,
Then judging by the consternation
The written syllables inspire,
A letter is a conflagration.

“I’m sure you must be mistaken. It cannot be possible!”

Madame Gervex, Marguerite’s governess and companion, turned her perplexed, good-natured face toward the gray-haired land-steward who had begun his labors at Plenhöel in the time of the present Marquis’s father. They were standing together on the far end of a lower side terrace overlooking the green silver of the bay, to-day in one of its most charming and innocent moods. There was scarcely a ripple to be seen: a mere fringe of dainty foam hemmed the rising tide as it lazily fretted up the narrow pebbly beach. A cable-length or so beyond that lace-like border a large float rode at anchor, and Marguerite, Laurence, Basil, and “Antinoüs” were alternately to be descried taking glorious headers from its snowy planking into the placid depths.

“Impossible, Madame Hortense? And why impossible, if you please?” Sulian Quentin asked, with some asperity. “You are so soft-hearted and innocent yourself that you can’t think anybody is made otherwise! Now I tell you—” And he emphasized each separate word with a smart tap of two fingers of his right hand on the hard, open palm of his left. “I tell you that this fine Demoiselle from over the Channel is well worth watching. Sweet as honey when she speaks to you, but her linings have been dipped in gall, just the same. Bitter! Madame Hortense! Bitter she is to the very core, and envious and mean, and capable of anything that’s not straight. I, Sulian Quentin, tell you this, and you’d do well to take my word for it!”

“But, Monsieur Sulian!” interrupted Madame Hortense.

“There’s no Monsieur Sulian about it. D’you imagine that I’ve navigated for fifteen years before taking hold of things here for defunct Monsieur le Marquis, without learning how to keep my eyes open? Bah! I’ve seen in my time many sorts of female quality, brown and red and blond and black, pretty and otherwise, clever and stupid, good, bad, and worse, but just such a piece as this one—!” He left his indictment incomplete, perhaps for lack of expressions fitted to his listener’s ears, and allowed his long arms to fall to his sides in a discouraged manner.

“But,” Hortense Gervex began again—“but what in the world made you take such a dislike to Mademoiselle Seton, Monsieur Sulian? She’s doing you no harm!”

“Yes, believe that and drink water!” he derisively retorted. “Look at her now, do, just to oblige me!” He was angrily pointing downward, and Hortense Gervex bent over the coping to see what he meant.

Plenhöel and Marguerite were swimming shoulder to shoulder toward the open sea, with that calm, regular stroke which is so telling for long-distance work. On the float Basil’s tall form showed clear as wax against the pale shimmer of the water, and, with her back turned to him, sat Laurence, on the very edge of the planking, her feet dipping in the sea, her hair falling around her mantle-wise and trailing behind her. Suddenly she turned, swung herself up on the float, and stood before him, her arms uplifted to raise above her head the shining mass of her tresses, her perfect figure displayed to its best advantage by a bathing-dress of pure white cashmere that clung very lovingly; and there was something so challenging in her statuesque pose that the term of “professional beauty,” naïvely applied to her a fortnight or so before by Marguerite, took on, indeed, a newer and more expressive meaning.

“The minx!” grumbled the old steward, elbow to elbow with Madame Hortense. “Oh, she’ll net him, never fear—and to think that our Marquis, always so malin, alert, and wide awake, does not notice her manœuvers! As to Mademoiselle ‘Gamin’—” He paused, blew out the air from his chest with a sigh like a Triton’s, and resumed: “She’s too young, thank the Saints, to perceive such wickedness, and yet she’s sharp as a needle, and some day she’ll see, and then!”

“Well what? What will she see some day, you old mischief? What will happen some day, according to you? After all, isn’t the Prince free to marry whom he chooses? Isn’t he rich enough for two? Why shouldn’t he have a beautiful wife if he likes to? Have you any personal objection to offer, Monsieur Sulian?”

Astounded by this abrupt style of address, so entirely foreign to gentle, kindly Madame Hortense, Sulian Quentin turned to her, his self-advertised eyes wide open.

“D’you mean to tell me,” he impressively pronounced, “that you’d approve of this one for him?”

Madame Hortense glanced meditatively in the direction of the float. “What have I got to approve or disapprove of in such a matter?” she said in a tone that went far toward answering his question. “Who are we, anyhow, to judge our masters?”

Quentin gave a short laugh. “Who indeed? Who are we, indeed? We who have served them loyally for year after year this long, long time; served them, and loved them, too! Yes, loved them as if they were our own children: defunct Monsieur le Marquis, and Madame la Marquise, and our present Monsieur le Marquis and Mademoiselle ‘Gamin.’”

“But what have they got to do with it?” asked Madame Hortense, beginning to feel utterly bewildered.

Quentin went back a step and glared at her.

“You’re a bat—a real genuine bat!” he said, contemptuously, “that’s all I’ve got to say. Daylight is nothing to you, so you might as well go on traveling in darkness all your days! Oh, have it your own way! Don’t think again; it would be idle; but still let me compliment you on your sharpness, ma bonne dame. Nothing to them!... Nothing to them! That’s a good one!”

He raised his arms far above his head in impotent protestation to an unkind Heaven, and, turning raspingly on his heel, left her without further ceremony to digest his cynical advice.

During Marguerite’s convent days Hortense Gervex had lived at Plenhöel as a very superior sort of housekeeper, looking, together with Quentin, after the Marquis’s interests, and keeping the château continually ready to receive him in the intervals of his trips to known and sometimes unknown portions of the globe. Years before, when widowed at twenty by the premature drowning of her husband, a fine young sailorman in command of a coasting steamer, she had come to Plenhöel as companion and reader to “Antinoüs’s” mother. She was now fifty-five, extremely well preserved, and very comely, with her thick blond hair, slightly frosted with silver above the temples, her wholesome face, and calm, blue-green eyes; and she literally adored the “Gamin.”

After Quentin’s departure she remained for a few moments more, watching the bathers frolicking in the wavelets below. Marguerite and her father were swimming back now, and presently ran foul of a school of porpoises playing “follow-my-leader” with the utmost gaiety. Madame Hortense saw Marguerite dive suddenly and come up immediately behind a big, shining fellow, whom she playfully slapped on the side. Girl and fish disappeared together in a quick smother of foam; then the fair head, darkened by immersion to a golden brown, emerged again and followed in the wake of the paternal one.

“Ah, my little mermaid!” murmured Madame Hortense. “Ma jolie petite sirène! Is what that scamp of Quentin hints at truly possible?”

Her affectionate eyes followed the thought to the float, and their expression slowly hardened. Laurence was still standing before Basil in the same provocative attitude, still busy with her splendid hair, twisting and untwisting it, as though to wring it dry. The hidden sun had just made up his mind to peep through his veil of pearly vapors, and a primrose glow of delicious warmth suffused the two figures. In that revealing light Madame Hortense became suddenly aware of the science that had presided over the making of Miss Seton’s costume, in spite of all its maidenly whiteness. The young girl’s illuminated silhouette all at once seemed terribly shocking to her in its Venus-like beauty—(Vénus sortant de l’onde)—and with a short exclamation she too turned on her heel and, running up the steps to the esplanade, rapidly entered the château. Her brows were knit and the flame of indignation shone warlike in her eyes.

The way to her own domain led past the suite of rooms occupied by Laurence, and with perfect deliberation she opened the door of the boudoir off the sleeping-apartment and entered.

This suite, comprising a bed, dressing and bath room, besides the boudoir in question, was designated by the household as la volière; for the whole plan of decoration was based upon bird life. It had been a fantasy of a Marquise de Plenhöel, arriving as a bride there from the Court of Versailles, to evolve for her own personal use this dainty retreat, so completely at variance with the grim fortress on the coast of Finisterre. She had been of a gay and witty spirit, had this pretty Marquise, and this was testified by the ingenuity with which these embellishments had been planned.

From the exquisite lampas covering the walls, where flights of winged things seemed alive amid branches of pale brocaded roses and apple-blossoms, from the curtains and portières of like material, the beautifully medallioned and painted ceilings, the pink-marble fireplaces and faintly gilded cornices, down to the very carpets, lounges, and chairs, birds and flowers were repeated in every imaginable hue and tint. Carved, embroidered, painted, and chiseled, the feathered tribes hovered between garlands of bloom as admirably preserved as if the hands of the artists had but just put the finishing touches to their gracious task. The inspirer of it all had died on the guillotine in 1794, but her pastel portrait hanging in the boudoir smiled the imperishable smile of an all-conquering loveliness and charm.

Her azure gaze, so proud and high-bred beneath the powdered and diamond-dewed waves of her coiffure, riveted Madame Hortense’s attention, as it always did when her duties called her to that portion of the State Apartments. She paused before the cupid-wreathed flame, and gazed at the slender waist in the silk-and-lace corselet of a Court toilette; at the slim hands clasped over the nacre sticks of a point d’Argentan fan; at the trail of jasmine intermingled with strands of great pearls, crossing like the ribbon of some Order from the right shoulder to the left ride of the cloth-of-silver girdle, and she sighed profoundly.

“Ah! quelle pitié!” she whispered, “quelle pitié!” Then, struck by a sudden thought, she bent swiftly forward. “How Marguerite resembles her!” she resumed, half aloud. “I had never noticed that before.” And a shade of fear darkened her own eyes for an instant. But she had not come to indulge in vain contemplations and vague forebodings. So, straightening herself, she cast a quick look about the room. Inside one of the window-places a Louis XVI. desk of celadon-green wood, inlaid preciously with more birds and flowers, had been left open. On the velvet-covered writing-board lay, in unpleasant contrast, one of those eminently durable and business-like blotting-books for which the world is indebted to England. Covered in pigskin, it displayed the large, flat monogram, L. S., in visibly extra-solid silver, while a fountain-pen of similar usefulness and practicality had been uncapped, in dangerous proximity to the softly faded lining of the desk.

If ever there existed a scrupulously honest and loyal woman, Madame Hortense was that one. Yet without any hesitation whatsoever she stepped to the window and resolutely opened the blotting-book. Between the rough leaves there was nothing save a few clear sheets of lavender-gray note-paper bearing the same letters, L. S., in violet and gold, and Madame Hortense let the covers fall together with some abruptness. She glanced into the immaculate depths of a beribboned basket near by, and was on the point of passing on into the adjacent bedroom when the violent stain made by a crimson-morocco volume on the pale loveliness of the room made her stop and take up the eye-offending object. “Scott’s Poems, by Scott. For a good little girl,” was the enlightening device she read on the fly-leaf, writ in an angular and manful, if not masculine, hand, and this was signed, “From Aunt Elizabeth.” Madame Hortense lacked perhaps a keen sense of humor, but yet she laughed, and was about to thrust the double absurdity out of sight when it slipped from her fingers and fell with a crash to the floor, flying open as it fell, and flinging half a dozen sheets of the lavender-gray paper in as many different directions.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” quoth Madame Hortense in three different tones, quickly picking them up. “So that’s the letter-box, eh?”

She was a trifle short-sighted, and, holding the loose pages close to her eyes, began to read. She knew English very well, and followed without the least trouble the small, neat lines of script that were disposed to slant diagonally down the sheets toward the outer corners, and as she read her kindly features gradually altered into something almost approaching a tragic mask. When she reached the last word of two copious epistles she confided them once more to Scott’s care, replaced his poems on the table where she had found them, and left the room with a curiously stiff gait, suggesting the Statue du Commandeur in “Don Juan.”

“So,” she thought, stalking wrathfully away, “Milady has a lover ... an English lover—created by Divine Providence expressly for her, excepting that he is not rich—an officer in the Life Guards, poor fellow!” Pausing for an instant, she leaned against the stair banister to reflect the better.

“Also,” she went on, mentally commenting, “she has a confidant—a cousin ... he is in the Scots Guards—to whom she tells all her little plots! Parfaitement! Mademoiselle Seton is well provided so far. Add to this a millionaire Russian Prince anxious to become her prey, it seems, and an American youth also possessed of vast wealth, but, alas, untitled, who likewise is in love with her, and we have the situation clear as mud. A very pretty situation indeed! Quentin is really no fool!”

She shook her head dismally, disarranging thereby the spick-and-span neatness of her undulated bandeaux crowned by a bow of creamy lace, and sought her own rooms, resolved to watch minutely the sorry game that—chance somewhat assisting—had just been revealed, and which presented many hitherto undreamed-of but very dangerous possibilities.

She who was here to watch over little motherless Marguerite at once began to heap a thousand undeserved reproaches upon herself for what she termed her unpardonable negligence, and felt indeed that in the last half-hour she had become a sadder if a wiser woman.

CHAPTER IV

Ask; I will not deny, within the strength
Courage and Honor may descry in me.
Ask of my service to the utmost length
And I will give it thee.

Marguerite was sitting on the short salt-grass at the top of the souffleur cliff. Beside her was a large reed basket, half filled with mousserons—those toothsome little pale-yellow mushrooms that grow in perfect circles all over the table-land—perfect circles, from which, however, one mushroom is always missing, because these erratic cryptogams appear only where the Farfadets (elves) have danced during the night, a member of their company lying on watch at full length upon the ground while they merrily disport themselves in an all but complete ronde.

The gray-green sward was still dotted with the quaint formation close to Marguerite, but she had stopped harvesting them, and sat idly—a strange thing for her to do—evidently absorbed in the evolutions of the gulls, which kept plunging headlong down to the blue waves, apparently for no other purpose than to fly immediately up again and preen their plumage in the veiled sunlight of the cliff-top.

There was an indefinite expression in Marguerite’s attitude which had never been there before: not lassitude, not ennui, but a queer lack of that verve and elasticity hitherto one of her greatest charms. Her delicious face, so like the pastel in the boudoir of the volière suite, was much as usual beneath the brim of her sailor-hat, her slim waist as supple, her shoulders as straight and well drilled as ever, and yet, and yet—?

Nobody had noticed any change in her, however, so change assuredly there could not be.

A quick step behind her made her turn and see Basil advancing in long strides from the “castle-path”—as the yard-wide track westward along the falaise is distinguished from the one in the opposite direction.

“Had a pleasant ride?” she queried, as he came up, instinctively making room for him beside her, as though there had not been mile after mile of room on both interminable stretches to east and to west.

“Yes,” he replied, lowering himself to the grass at her side and pushing back his cap to let the strong sea-breeze cool his forehead. “A very nice ride. But why didn’t you come with us, my dear little ‘Gamin’?”

His dear little “Gamin” resumed her contemplation of the whirling gulls, her eyes averted from him.

“Oh,” she replied, lightly, “I didn’t feel like riding to-day. Besides, these mushrooms needed cutting.”

Basil laughed. “A fine excuse!” he declared. “And as to your not feeling like riding, you who, so to speak, have been born on horseback—a little Centauress!”

He bent sideways to see her face, but she petulantly left a mere profile for his inspection.

“Oh, there’s an eagle!” she exclaimed, pointing to a distant crag, where a solitary bird of great size had just alighted.

“An eagle! Yes, I think it must be an eagle,” he amiably corroborated, without troubling to look in that direction. “Let him be; he is well enough there. Can’t you be serious a moment, ‘Gamin’? I want to speak to you.”

His face was grave now, and the tone of his voice made her veer round with a sudden anxiety.

“Anything wrong?” she asked.

“No, of course not ... I only wish to ... ask your advice about a personal matter. You are a very wise little person, sometimes, you know.”

“Am I? It’s the first time I hear of it!” she exclaimed. “It sounds very nice!”

“I’m glad it does, ‘Gamin,’ because it’s the plain truth. And I am sorely in need of wisdom just now, having apparently none left of my own.”

Marguerite laughed, and a quick blush followed the laugh.

“Set forth the case for judgment,” she said, reaching to gather a dewy mousseron and tossing it negligently into the basket; but he suddenly caught her hand and held it tightly in his.

“Look here!” he pleaded. “I cannot speak if you don’t keep quiet. What I have to say is not so awfully easy.”

“It is serious, then?” she questioned, hesitatingly, her fingers remaining his willing prisoners.

“Very serious.”

The “Gamin” slowly shifted her head, and her luminous eyes met his frankly.

“Speak then,” she said in an odd voice, which seemed all at once a little strangled.

“Well!” Basil began. “Well—now supposing you were asked ... would you ... would a young girl like you find me too old to—to marry?”

Marguerite started and drew her hand firmly away. There was a silence during which the clamor of the gulls became enervatingly loud. A hurtling squadron of noisy birds swept over Marguerite’s and Basil’s heads, settled in disorder on the grass ten yards farther on, and instantly ceased shrieking.

“Well?” Basil, who had also fallen into a bird-study, resumed with an effort.

“Well, I told you so before. You are not so very old.” There was a pitiful little attempt at humor and lightness in the words. “I ... you see ... I was teasing you that day.... I was much younger then.”

“Much younger,” he expostulated, “four weeks ago!”

“Four weeks—is that all?” she wondered.

“Yes, just four weeks to-morrow. I remember because ... never mind why.... But you have not really answered me.” He recaptured her hand and pressed it. “Do, ‘Gamin,’ do, please say something encouraging!” he murmured, almost in her ear, and quite unconsciously drawing her toward him.

Her graceful body stiffened, and almost immediately relaxed again. The hand in his was trembling a very little.

“I think you would make a very nice husband,” she said, innocently, not in the least aware of what she was saying.

A quick smile lighted up Basil’s eyes. “You dear child!” he whispered. “You little darling!”

Marguerite sat quite still waiting—waiting for she knew not what; her heart beating so fast that she became afraid he might hear it. Fortunately more gulls were swooping up from below the giddy brink, and the surge of their wings made this improbable.

“Then you would not laugh at me if I were to ask you to—”

He paused, searching for the exact words he wanted, and Marguerite, her lips slightly apart, listened a trifle breathlessly. “To help me?” he concluded with unexpected force.

“Help you? How? What do you mean, Cousin Basil?”

She was desperately trying to conquer some unexplainable emotion.

“You see, I don’t like to ask your father. He would begin by making fun of me!”

“Fun of you!”

“Oh, without a doubt! You know him, Marguerite.” He had never called her Marguerite before, and she wondered why he did so now. “He is barely four years older than I am, you understand, and....”

“What does that matter?” she interrupted, with a happy little smile. “He—”

She checked herself and hastily altered the sentence to a “He likes you very much, you know!” which was extraordinarily meaningless.

“And do you like me very much, too?” Basil asked, looking straight ahead in the eye of the wind. It was a pity he could not see her smile now, or the expression that accompanied the light casualness of her reply, for both were revealing.

“Yes; very much, Cousin Basil.”

“I know you do, my dear little ‘Gamin,’ and that is what emboldened me to ask your advice just now.”

He was still gazing out to sea, wrapped in his own thought, while she waited, a faint tingling in her finger-tips warning her that her patience was really being tried. She moved restlessly once or twice, until finally one slender fawn-suède-shod foot hung directly over the knife-like edge of the cliff. In the offing a fleet of fishing-boats that from that height resembled a mere flight of red-and-white butterflies, were drowsily drifting under slack sails toward the harbor of Kastèllék, behind the crag where still sat enthroned the contemplative eagle.

Absently, mechanically, almost, Marguerite pulled from the rock-border of the salt-grass a fat stem of perce-pierre, and stuck it in her mouth. The juice of that briny plant—eatable only when steeped in vinegar—bit smartly into her tongue, but she did not even notice it, for she was watching Basil intently; his handsome profile, the deep-set gray eyes under their energetic brows, the obstinate chin, and clean-cut mouth by no means concealed by the short, light mustache which contrasted so happily with the red-brown hair faintly limned with silver. Her cousin Basil! She was very proud of him. Was there any other man like him in the whole round world?

“I hesitate to ask you another service,” she heard him say now, and with praiseworthy energy she roused herself.

“Don’t hesitate, Cousin Basil!” she said, with a hint of shyness.

“Do you think you could manage to sound your friend’s ideas on the subject?”

“My friend ... the subject!” she echoed, blankly. Whatever doubt and surprise she might have felt before was transformed into complete puzzlement. She was coming back from so great a distance!

“Yes—your friend Laurence, of course! You see,” he continued, more easily now that he had burned his bridges behind him—“you see, my ‘Gamin,’ ridiculous or not, my whole future life is centered upon her. I fell in love with her the minute I set eyes upon her, and if she refuses to marry me—”

With a wild scramble that all but threw her headlong over the precipice the “Gamin” jumped up. She was ashy white, and as he caught her—as it were in mid-air—he felt that she was shaking, literally from head to foot.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded, holding her tightly in his arms, as if afraid that she would try to escape. “Lord! how you startled me. What do you mean by dancing about like that in such a place!”

She saw that he was badly frightened, for his voice trembled as he spoke, and she disengaged herself quietly, and in a curiously calm tone apologized.

“I am very sorry, mon cousin. I hope you will forgive the scare I gave you,” she said, simply.

“Sacré...!” The rest of the heartfelt string of objurgations rising in his throat bumped against his teeth, and he swallowed it whole, so to speak. She had returned a few paces, and, picking up her basket, was standing cold and pale as a lily, scanning the horizon.

“Plenhöel should hire a keeper for you!” Basil cried, with that vengeful irritation which invariably succeeds great frights. “You are not fit to be trusted out alone!”

“Thank you very much, mon bon cousin!” she said, with a little courtesy in his direction. “Not you, I hope, however. He might find you inadequate—and, besides, if you will now take the trouble to look yonder, behind the menhir, you will see Hortense Gervex dozing over her knitting. She is my keeper.”

“A famous guardian!” Basil deprecated in disgust. “As a matter of fact you have jumbled my ideas so that I scarcely remember what I was talking to you about!”

“I do!” responded Marguerite. “I remember it perfectly, and, acting upon your recent request, I will try to find out what you wish to know, as soon as possible.”

A quick suspicion, as fleet as the flight of an arrow, shot through Basil’s heart. What was this in her voice, her manner, that seemed so queer? He turned and faced her in acute distress; but there she stood, apparently quite unmoved, in a perfectly natural attitude, both little hands clasped upon the handle of her mushroom-basket, and inwardly Basil wrathfully called himself an imbecile. That child—that mere baby—it seemed almost a desecration to have, even for a second, believed her capable of “grown-up” feelings. Ah! Yes, indeed, she was justly named the “Gamin,” with her boyish, reckless ways, her laughter, her merry pranks. Poor dear little “Gamin.”

They were walking side by side, now, in the direction of the menhir, to retrieve Madame Hortense, who, had they known it, was far from “dozing over her knitting,” but wide awake indeed, very watchful, and gleefully imagining that things were going on quite satisfactorily between those two. Marguerite had refused to relinquish her basket to Basil, and was swinging it carelessly by the handle as she advanced toward her governess.

“Wake up! Wake up!” she cried, making a trumpet of both her hands through the basket handle. “Time to go home, Hortense!”

Madame Hortense rose, methodically folded her work, and, coming on to meet them, fell in immediately behind on the narrow track. The grass for yards and yards was now covered with sitting gulls, forming a great restless carpet of living snow, while hovering above them, a host of late-comers violently protested against the pre-emption of what they naturally considered their own particular territory.

Marguerite and Basil, a mere half-head in front of Madame Hortense, were silent. Once she stumbled over a small stone, and laughed at her extraordinary clumsiness when Basil caught her by the elbow. But there must have been something odd in the timbre of that laugh, for Madame Hortense instantly ranged up alongside and gave her a quick, searching glance that Marguerite met with eyes as bright and hard as steel. As to Basil, he was again sunk in his own dreams, and Hortense resumed her former place with a puzzled sigh.

Leaving him on the perron, and Madame Hortense sitting unquietly on one of the terrace benches, Marguerite ran to the stables, ordered her favorite horse, “Gavroche,” to be saddled at once, whispered a few words to the old piqueux, who always accompanied her when she rode without her father, and raced back with nervous speed to put on her habit.

Fifteen minutes later she was cantering across the heather toward the forest, with the ease of those who have begun this sport of sports as soon as they could stand on their feet, but with far from her usual pleasure. As she reached the first pines standing sentinel-wise at the limit of the lande the sun was just beginning its downward course to the ocean-rim, and she realized with a certain joyless satisfaction that earth and sea would still for many hours be bathed in that rose-gold light, which, save on very few occasions, on hard midsummer or midwinter days, is the veiled glory of Brittany.

Nobody at the Castle knew that she had gone out, for she had bidden Ireland, the piqueux, to wait for her in the “yard,” where she had mounted “Gavroche,” and now Ireland was following fifty paces behind on “Méssire-Antoine,” the “worst-minded devil at Plenhöel”—as he was distinguished by his present gray-haired rider from a vast company of mettlesome thoroughbreds housed on three rides of the equine “yard,” very much as the hosts of the château were lodged about the Cour-d’Honneur.

Bending her head beneath the sweeping boughs of the vanguard of trees, Marguerite galloped into a narrow sandy path padded with last year’s pine-needles. She had adopted a pace that suggested flight from some imminent danger, some indeterminate presence that must be avoided at all cost. Her eyes had a fixed, harsh look that certainly had never sojourned there before, and the ungloved hands, tightened on the reins, had a grim expression all their own. “Méssire-Antoine,” fired by the example of “Gavroche,” gave Ireland some trouble to keep him at the regulation distance, so that this worthy began to wonder what ailed his young mistress. He, too, was an ancient servitor, a relic of the late Marquis, who when still a youth had brought him back from a hunting trip in Queen Victoria’s dominions, and ever since then the man had remained at Plenhöel, well satisfied with his lot. It was he, as a matter of fact, who first had put Marguerite on a pony the size of a Newfoundland dog, settled her baby form in the little velvet chair on its back, and gradually taught her how to stick on something less easy. Curbing his evil-tempered mount, he now watched the little figure ahead in the gray linen, close-fitting habit, the thick, fair hair clubbed low on the neck by a flat barret of yellow tortoise-shell, the trim gray sailor-hat tilted forward, and last, but not least, the absurdly small foot with its gleaming golden spur poised in the stirrup, au ras de la jupe. He smiled discreetly as he recalled the winning of that golden spur by “le Chevalier Gamin”—as her father had dubbed her from that day on. It was at a boar-hunt, when, out of a large assembly, she alone had arrived at the finish with the Master. She was only fourteen then, and, as it chanced, on sick-leave from her convent; but the spirit of all the past and present Plenhöels, their contempt of pain, their horror of ever being beaten, had flamed up in her, and the prize of that victory had been the little golden token of knighthood—not only because she had won, but because already then she was bent on always winning, on always being on time to prevent her dogs from being “unsewn” by their fierce quarry, at the kill.

Almost soundlessly the hoofs of “Gavroche” and of “Méssire-Antoine” flew along the felted forest-track, and not once did Marguerite slacken speed until the “Carrefour” of the “Seven Sages” was reached. Why the Seven Sages no one could tell, or had ever known precisely, but here it was at last, a little break of blue sky among the crowding tree-tops, a green island underfoot, luxuriously moss-carpeted all about a lofty throne-like rock indented by seven curious niches, which formed its exact center. Foxgloves in rich profusion proudly swung their chimes of pink bells beneath its craggy sides, and tall ferns of extravagant vigor grew in sturdy clumps here, there, and everywhere. Its towering grandeur made a new idea break upon the painful confusion of the young girl’s thoughts, and she beckoned to Ireland, stopped, and, sliding to earth, stood holding out the reins to him with averted face.

“I’m going to the top of the rock while you walk them about,” she said, shortly, and left him gravely alarmed, for he had never yet seen his gracious lady so very pale, or so abrupt and cold.

The top of the Throne Rock—something of a scramble to reach—was as flat as one’s hand, and to the eye hard as only black basalt can look—and be; but Marguerite flung herself down upon it, nevertheless, and lay flat, her hands crossed behind her head, her eyes searching the pale-blue gulf above for the answer to her riddle, the soothing of her stormy reflections. She kept so still that a robin red-breast adventured himself close to her feet. He bent his head wisely, cocked a wary brilliant eye upon the shining rowel of her spur, advanced yet farther—near enough to peck the hem of her skirt—retreated with an impudent swelling of bright feathers, advanced again, and then with a comically disappointed mien flew up to the topmost branch of a slender birch hard by, and clung there, gazing down at her from that convenient height. Unfortunately, the wide-open eyes, with the faint azure rings beneath them, had no vision just then for the picture he made, with his scarlet breast and fluffy body boldly showing against a trembling spray of purest yellow, such as sapling trees sometimes bear among their summer foliage—a dignity beyond their age and strength, like a silver thread or two amid youthful locks, or a line of pain on a young face; while the sun went slowly on his way and the transparent shadows shifted across the fragrant glade.

For a long time Marguerite lay there motionless. She might have been carved from the rock itself, so little sign of life did she give, and when at length she rose, all of a piece—as was her wont—there was no longer any trace of emotion or chagrin on her charming little face.

“I’ll sound her to-night,” she whispered to the deep heaven above that apparently had given her the answer she sought; and, climbing swiftly down, she rejoined Ireland with a “Let’s gallop home, Irry,” that instantly cheered and comforted her old retainer; for the voice and the manner were once more those of his “Chevalier-Gamin.”

CHAPTER V

Fate plays no honest game, but when
You glance aside or back
She palms the discard slyly, then
Redeals it with the pack.

“Papa,” the “Gamin” said, “I wish we would not go to Paris this winter.”

She was driving “Antinoüs” home from Châstelcoûrt, the home of Comte René of that ilk, “Grand Louvetier de Bretagne,” and she spoke lightly, all her attention being presumably devoted to the careful guiding of her pet trotters, “Scylla” and “Charybdis”—quite a job in itself, being given the tempers of the beasts in question.

“Not go to Paris?” “Antinoüs” asked in surprise. “Not appear during your first season before what is left of our world? Why, ‘Gamin,’ what can you be thinking of?”

“Oh, nothing in particular, excepting of what Monsieur de Châstelcoûrt told you about the wolves in the mountains. It has been years—you heard—since they have been so numerous, which is not unnatural,” she went on, jerking the storm-collar of her long fur-lined driving-coat up to her little ears. “Brr-rr-rr. It is cold ... for Brittany, that is!”

“Not down at Plenhöel!” “Antinoüs” argued. “Here in the foot-hills, all right; but there we have only rain and fog and squalls to our heart’s content, which does not make for gaiety.”

“Then you are not a real Breton, my father—dear!” Marguerite exclaimed, tickling with the bud the glossy hind quarters of “Charybdis.” “Not a bona-fide son of the Celtic Sea,” she resumed, restraining the antics of the deeply offended horse. “Oh, you needn’t tug at your mustache! I am stating a fact.”

“Antinoüs” turned and gave her a quick look, but all he could see was the half of her profile between her upturned collar and the revers of her fur toque drawn down nearly to her brows. Her eyes were steadily fixed upon “Charybdis’s” ears, this unregenerate miscreant being still somewhat resentfully inclined.

“Why don’t you want to go to Paris?” asked the youthful father. “It is surely not only the chance of some wolf-hunting?”

Marguerite replied at once: “The wolves naturally have a great deal to do with it, but even barring them, I should much rather remain here—at home.”

“Isn’t the Hôtel de Plenhöel home, too? After all, it has been ours for many, many generations, which should lend it some of the charm that the old place here has for us. Besides, all our relatives and most of our friends are already in Paris, or will be there soon. Among others your beloved Laurence, who, by the way, is, as a Russian Princess, certainly an astounding success. Poor old Basil! I’ll be glad to see him again, although I still can’t help being sure he was a fool to marry her.”

Of a truth “Charybdis” must have been in a sour mood that morning, for at this point he cut such a caper that “Antinoüs” interrupted his discourse to advise Marguerite to land her team in the ditch before worse happened, and have done with it! The sarcasm, however, apparently did not touch her, for she gave no sign of annoyance, and as soon as the horses had resumed a more dignified allure, he went on, quietly: