Mechanically he had obeyed, and turned back in the direction of the main gates of the park. The Lodge--a small stone pavilion--was just inside the gates.
"We don't want to be spied from the château, do we, _mon cousin_?" added the young girl, whilst a ripple of laughter, musical as the song of a lark, helped to chase away the last lingering remnant of de Maurel's moodiness. "_Ma tante_ would be vastly shocked, for my hair is dishevelled, and my gown wet and stained. Laurent would be angry and father would scold...."
She paused and suddenly uttered an exclamation of dismay.
"What is it?" he asked. "Mademoiselle Fernande, what is it? Are you in pain?"
"No. No, it is not that. My foot is so much better ... but ... but...."
She seemed ready to cry, and just now he felt that he would curse loudly and long if he saw her in distress.
"In Heaven's name, Mademoiselle Fernande," he implored, "I entreat you to tell me what troubles you."
"My shoe and my stocking," she murmured in a weak, trembling voice. "I left them beside the pool."
Ronnay de Maurel literally gave a gasp of horror. A calamity such as this seemed to him to be beyond the confines of possibility.
"Beside the pool!" he exclaimed aghast. "Impossible!"
"How impossible?" she retorted impatiently. "I haven't my shoe and stocking on, have I?"
He took a peep at the bare, rosy toes, which vied in delicacy with the apple-blossom overhead.
"Well? And have you got them in your pocket, _mon cousin_?"
Sighing with regret, he vowed that he had not.
"Then I must have left them by the pool," she concluded.
"I'll go and fetch them," he said at once.
"And walk another dozen kilomètres to-day?"
"When shall I bring them?" was all that he said by way of rejoinder.
"Well, it will have to be soon ... that is if you really think that you wouldn't be too tired to go and fetch them.... But, you know, Mme. la Marquise is so rigid in the matter of decorum ... she will be so angry when she hears that I have lost my shoe ... and she will scold me ... and...."
We may take it that de Maurel was far too unversed in the usages of feminine amenities to notice how hopelessly the lovely creature in his arms was floundering in the mazes of her own rhetoric; he was obviously far too unsophisticated to suggest that if Mme. la Marquise was, indeed, so rigid in the matter of decorum, she would hardly approve of his walking in at Courson one day with her niece's shoe in one pocket and her stocking in the other. Just for a moment Fernande had a slight qualm of anxiety. She had engineered this final move in her campaign on the spur of the moment, and she had not had the time to think it out in detail. But, indeed, her fears were futile. De Maurel did not even notice the glaring discrepancy in the tale of Mme. la Marquise's supposed attitude towards the proprieties. As a matter of fact, the thought that Fernande should be scolded for having lost her stocking was so horrible, that his one idea now was a longing to get to the Lodge, to deposit his fair burden--if possible in Annette's charge--and then to start running at once, as fast as his wounded leg would allow--in search of the two precious articles.