"And has M'sieur not even yet come to a decision?" she said softly in
his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before _dejeuner_, the
acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. "Because, if
it's so difficult, we must all try together to help him!"

The question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was
spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as
she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite
understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused his
small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and her
manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind,
frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was
waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.

At the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close
beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.

"It is true I find it difficult to leave," he stammered, losing his way
deliciously in the depths of her eyes, "and especially now that
Mademoiselle Ilse has come."

He was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted
with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have
bitten his tongue off for having said it.

"Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to
stay on," she said, ignoring the compliment.

"I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you," he cried, feeling that
his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he
was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest
description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him,
and made to go.

"It is _soupe a l'onion_ to-day!" she cried, laughing back at him
through the sunlight, "and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you
know, M'sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will
leave us!"

He watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and
lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he
thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned
once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then
stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in
her corner seat just inside the hall-way.

But how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly
woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they w