"Well," she sighed, affecting an accord she did not feel, "we can only hope now that your telegram will prove effective. Who is the person whose aid Mr. Raymond is securing?"
Mrs. Carmac wrinkled her smooth forehead. "I have not heard the name," she said, after a pause. "But there is nothing unusual in that. Raymond is curiously secretive. Any other man, living in a household on the footing he occupied in the Chase and in Charles Street, would have spoken at times of his relatives. He, for all I knew of his earlier history, might have been born in--Saturn. I was going to say Mars; but Mr. Raymond does not meet one's ideal of a Martian."
At that Yvonne was constrained to smile. Neither she nor the woman who dismissed Raymond and Duquesne so flippantly could guess what sinister influences lurked behind the association of those two men. An astrologer would have found something ominous in that haphazard reference to the planetary harbingers of disaster, Saturn and Mars, and, oddly enough, a half-thought of the sort did flit through Yvonne's mind, because she often found amusement and interest, during the mild and clear winters of Brittany, in reading the firmament from a stellar atlas, and there was hardly a constellation in the northern heavens she could not name at sight.
At that moment, however, relief from a rather forced conversation came in the shape of Captain Popple's burly form.
"Beg pardon, Ma'am, for intrudin' at this time," he said, when admitted, "but I thought you'd like to hear the result of today's operations on the reef. Atween Peridot an' a trawl, we've been doin' things."
"Is Peridot here--in Pont Aven?" interrupted Yvonne, blanching in quick alarm.
"Yes, Miss. He kem from Concarneau this mornin', an' I've brought him up the river on tonight's tide."
"I'm not quite sure, Miss. He left me a couple o' minutes since. While I was havin' a word with Jackson, Peridot went up the hill."
Popple was undoubtedly perplexed by this sudden concern as to Peridot's physical condition; but he answered readily enough, "Well, Miss, if he isn't, he ought to be. We've been hard at it, high water an' low, for fourteen hours."
Yvonne was so visibly relieved that Popple's bewilderment increased. Of course he had heard no word of Madeleine's flight, and he could not understand that if Peridot had gone home and to bed there was a chance that the fisherman might leave the village again early in the morning without being told the disastrous news, since Madame Larraidou was a cautious old body, who would not vex her son with idle gossip.