"Nay, dear cousin, let us not dwell on that sad subject any longer. See! the sun is high in the heavens--the birds are singing a deafening anthem of joy ... and," she added archly, "I am still breakfastless."
Again de Maurel had to chide himself for a clumsy and selfish lout. For himself he would gladly have continued to dwell on the sad subject, seeing that it was being argued by an exquisite creature with the rosiest of lips and the most enthralling voice he had ever heard, even whilst she leaned her ethereal form against his arm, and cast an occasional look on him from out a pair of eyes as limpid and as blue as the sky. But the word "breakfastless" once more struck him with remorse. To think that this beautiful and diaphanous being could suffer hunger, discomfort, even pain, seemed to him the most monstrous outrage in the whole scheme of creation.
"God forgive me," he said, "for a thoughtless dolt. I was forgetting the flight of time. Now, Mademoiselle Fernande, if you will trust yourself to me...."
"Do you really mean," she queried, "that you will carry me all the way to Courson?"
She threw him a mute glance of gratitude, which somehow seemed to addle his brain in a manner which he thought strangely unaccountable, but not altogether unpleasant.
"Oh, my flowers!" she suddenly exclaimed ruefully. "I had taken such trouble to pick them!"
The sheaf of wild hyacinth was lying in a disordered mass of blue at her feet.
"_Mon cousin_, I pray you pick them up for me!" she added with a pretty tone of appeal.
At once he was down on his knees; it seemed practically impossible that he should disobey the slightest of her commands, and, mechanically, he gathered together the bunch of bluebells and handed it up to her. He was strangely awkward in the accomplishment of this task, and when he looked up to her again, a mischievous light was dancing in her eyes.
"You think me a clumsy oaf, I'll warrant," he said, while that ghost of a smile which became him so well lit up his face in response. "'Tis the first time in my life I've waited on a lady, and...."
As she took the flowers from him her fingers closed for a moment over his hand.
"'Tis most gallantly you do it, Sir Knight," she said graciously.