The Azure Rose Part 18

"I find," confessed the Lady in English, "that they are not so good below as they seemed on the top. You will not object?"

Oh, no: Cartaret wouldn't object.

"I suppose," said Mlle. Urola, "that I should reprimand her, for their quality is"--she frowned at the berries--"inferior; but I have not the heart. Not for the whole world could I hurt her feelings. She is both so kind and so proud, and she is such a marvel of economy. You, sir, would not guess how well she makes me fare upon how small an expense."

After breakfast, she showed him some examples of her work. It had delicacy and feeling. An unprejudiced critic would have said that she had much to learn in the way of technique, but to Cartaret every one of her sketches was a marvel.

"This," she said, again in English, as she produced a drawing from the bottom of her bundle, "does not compare with what you did, sir, but it is not the work of a flatterer, since it is my own work. It is I."

It was a rapid sketch of herself and it was, as she had said, the work of no flatterer.

"I like that least of all," declared Cartaret, in the language to which she had returned; but he wanted her to forget those portraits he had made. He caught, consequently, at trifles. "Why don't you say 'It's me'?" he asked.

She clasped her hands behind her and stood looking up at him with her chin tilted and her unconscious lips close to his.

"I say what is right, sir," she challenged.

He laughed, but shook his head.

"I know better," said he.

"No," she said. She was smiling, but serious. "It is I that am right.

And even if I learned that I were wrong, I would now not change. It would be a surrender to you."

Cartaret found his color high. His mind was putting into her words a meaning he was afraid she might see that he put there.

"Not to me," he said.

"Yes, yes, to you!"

Surrender! What a troublesome word she was using!

The chin went higher; the lips came nearer.

"A complete surrender, sir." Quickly she stepped back. If she had read his face rightly, her face gave no hint of it, but she was at once her former self. "And that I will never do," she said, reverting to French.

It was Cartaret's turn to want to change the subject. He did it awkwardly.

"Have you been in the Bois?" he asked.

No, she had not been in the Bois. She loved nature too well to care for artificial scenery.

"But the Bois is the sort of art that improves on nature," he protested; "at least, so the Parisian will tell you; and, really, it is beautiful now. You ought to see it. I was there last night."

"You go alone into the Bois in the night? Is not that dangerous?"

He could not tell whether she was mocking him. He said:

"It isn't dangerous in the afternoons, at any rate. Let me take you there."

She hesitated. Chitta was clattering dishes in the improvised kitchen.

"Perhaps," said the Lady.

Cartaret's heart bounded.

"Now?" he asked.

The dishes clattered mightily.

"How prompt you are!" she laughed. "No, not now. I have my lessons."

"To-morrow, then?"

"Perhaps," said the Lady of the Rose. "Perhaps----"

Cartaret's face brightened.

"That is," explained his hostess, "if you will not try to teach me English, sir."

CHAPTER X

AN ACCOUNT OF AN EMPTY PURSE AND A FULL HEART, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH THE AUTHOR BARELY ESCAPES TELLING A VERY OLD STORY

C'est etat bizarre de folie tendre qui fait que nous n'avons plus de pensee que pour des actes d'adoration. On devient veritablement un possede que hante une femme, et rien n'existe plus pour nous a cote d'elle.--De Maupa.s.sant: _Un Soir_.

The Lady's "perhaps" meant "yes," it seemed, for, when Cartaret called for her the next day, he found her ready to go to the Bois, and not the Lady only: hovering severely in the immediate background, like a thunder-cloud over a Spring landscape, was Chitta, wrapped in a shawl of marvelous lace, doubtless from her own country, and crowned with a brilliant bonnet unmistakably procured at some second-hand shop off the rue St. Jacques. The Lady noticed his expression of bewilderment and appeared a little annoyed by it.

"Of course," she said, "Chitta accompanies us."

Cartaret had to submit.

"Certainly," said he.

He proposed a taxi-cab to the Bois--he had visited the Mont de Piete--but the Lady would not hear of it; she was used to walking; she was a good walker; she liked to walk.

"But it's miles," Cartaret protested.

"It is nothing," said she.

Her utmost concession was to go by tram to the _Arc_.

It was a beautiful day in the Bois, with half of Paris there: carriages from the Faubourg St. Germain, motors of the smart set, hired conveyances full of tourists. The trees were a tender green; the footways crowded by the Parisian bourgeois, making a day of it with his family. Slim officers walked, in black jackets and red trousers, the calves of their legs compressed in patent-leather riding-leggings; women of the half-world showed brilliant toilettes that had been copied by ladies of the _haut monde_, who, driven past, wore them not quite so well. Grotesquely clipped French poodles rode in the carriages, and Belgian police-dogs in the automobiles; thin-nosed collies frolicked after their masters; here and there a tailless English sheep-dog waddled by, or a Russian boar-hound paced sedately; children played on the gra.s.s and dashed across the paths with a suddenness that threatened the safety of the adult pedestrians.

Cartaret led the way into the less frequented portions of the great park beyond the Lac Inferieur. The Lady was pleasantly beside him, Chitta unpleasantly at his heels.