"And the early ones seem so long and weary--until the first love adventure looms in sight. Ah! those first little adventures, how lovely they are! To realise that we are desirable ... that some one wants us ... finds us pretty and charming ... to feel the little wings of womanhood sprouting on our shoulder-blades! Oh, Harry, we mustn't grudge the enchantment of it to our girls! Don't you remember how delightful it was? Was anything that came after half so wonderful?"

"I know," said Harriott, the gentle light of reminiscence in her eye.

"But this is a different matter, my dear. These are _Frenchmen_."

"But they are really very Irish-looking," laughed Val, who not being English never could understand the curious aversion that sits deep in almost every Englishwoman's heart for the male species across the Channel. "And those two kids are as happy and excited as larks in the wind. I 'm sure that kind of thing should never be suppressed, Harry."

"I dare say you are right, dear. Only we must make fun of them sometimes so that there shall be no danger of their taking it seriously.

I think I 'd rather have Kitty take the veil than take a Frenchman."

That same evening as they all sat playing Bridge in the little wooden dining-room of Villa Duval, a whirr of bicycle wheels was heard without.

Then a silence and the sound of some one walking softly over the gla.s.s and broken china with which the other side of the road was freely decorated. Under the table Haidee handed Kitty a hack on the shins, but their faces remained bland, their interest in the game unabated. It was a black night and to look out of the window availed nothing. A few moments later came the sound of bicycles in retreat. At bedtime the two girls stayed whispering and speculating long in Kitty's room, which overlooked the road, but the mystery of the bicycles was unexplained--until the next morning. Bran, standing on Val's bed, as was his pleasant custom when dressing, suddenly shouted--and a shout in Villa Duval could be heard through every room in the house.

"_What's that red thing in my 'Jules Duval'?_"

The _Jules Duval_, as has been explained, was _pere_ Duval's old fishing boat, which had been fixed-up and painted to be the special joy and plaything of Bran. He adored boats and everything to do with the sea, and spent all his days in the _Jules_ going imaginary voyages.

"There 's something red fastened to the mast," he shrieked excitedly, and upstairs two necks were craned to cracking point from Kitty's bedroom window. Insufficiently clothed as he was Bran tore out to the boat, and came back bearing in triumph an enormous cabbage rose--full blown, and rather tired from being up all night. Both girls put out their hands for it. Bran looked at them in surprise.

"Why, it was in _my_ boat! Perhaps an angel put it there for me..."

The girls turned away in wrath. Later they were each seen to go separately to the _Jules_ and give a sort of casual glance into the bottom of it. It was possible, of course, that Bran might have overlooked something!

"Only one rose! How clever of those young scamps!" chuckled Val, and Harriott with joyful malice pinned the flopping rose to the breast of Bran's red sweater, where it drooped its life away.

The girls were constrained with each other all day. The tide was low and there was no excuse to go to the beach. Perhaps that was why the two took books and sat in the _Jules_ all the morning pretending to read, but with a keen lookout on the road and all stray cyclists. Bran, greatly delighted to have pa.s.sengers, took them several voyages to New York and back. Harry and Val, professing to be busy inside the Villa, cast many an intrigued glance from the windows. Nothing happened.

Next morning a basket of figs was found in the boat--beautiful, luscious, purple figs. Now the only fig-trees in Mascaret grew in the garden of the Admiral of Shai-poo!

Val and Harriott went to early Ma.s.s, and returning ran into the two heroes coming up from the river. They had been for an early morning sail, and wore a pleasantly disreputable air in their blue fisherman jerseys and turned-up coat collars. They cast sheepish glances at the two ladies, and the younger had the grace to blush.

"They really are nice-looking boys," Harriott admitted, but at the breakfast table a few minutes later she expressed herself differently.

"We met those two Romeos from the Villa Shai-poo as we were coming from Ma.s.s," she announced. "Seedy-looking fellows. One of them looked as if a tub might do him good."

The girls bristled like Irish terriers.

"Which one?" they demanded in one breath.

"The one with the drunken blue eyes," said Val, aware that this was sheer malice.

"Oh, that's Rupert!" Relief burst from Haidee. But Kitty's appet.i.te was gone. She a.s.sumed a dark and menacing expression of countenance that her mother declared reminded her of Mendelssohn's _Spring Song_.

"It makes me want to prance and leap like Cissie Loftus imitating Maude Allen when I see you look like that, Kit," she said. But Kit remained cross as a cat and would not smile.

"And where did these figs come from?" asked Val in amaze.

"They are Bran's," quoth Haidee demurely. "An angel left them in the _Jules_ for him."

It may have been religious fervour which then seized the girls or it may merely have been a fervour for going in the direction of Mascaret, at any rate they patronised both High Ma.s.s and Vespers and seemed to be discontented that there were no further services to attend.

In the evening, as it was Sunday, there were letters to write instead of the usual game of Bridge. Every one appeared to be deeply occupied, but a listening look was so apparent on two faces that Harriott could not resist a mischievous remark to Val.

"I wonder if the cabbages have come yet?" As if by some magical arrangement with fate there came on the instant the usual whirring sound followed by the crackling underfoot of broken crockery which had strayed from the garbage hole.

"What's that?" cried Bran nervously from his bed in the next room.

"Hush, my Wing! I expect it's only a basket of eggs arriving in the _Jules_," soothed his mother.

"Soon we shall not have to go to market, Val," remarked Harriott; "all that we need will be found in the boat. I wonder if it's a Customs'

officer or a gendarme who is so kind?"

"I think a delicate attention on our part would be to tie a return bouquet on to the mainmast," said Val thoughtfully. "Should we go out and gather some, Harry--just to show that we enjoyed the figs?"

"Oh, no! Val," burst out Haidee, "you 'll spoil everything."

"Spoil?" said Val with wondering eyes. "_Everything_? Surely a little grat.i.tude...? Old _pere_ Duval has some nice sunflowers."

But the girls had burst from the room in a rage. Val and Harriott, exploding with laughter, went for a walk down the _digue_ in the mild darkness.

"Poor kids!" said Harriott. "Perhaps we really ought not to torment them so much."

"My dear, it is the proudest moment of their lives," laughed Val.

"Their first conquest! At such times mothers are always looked upon as sort of ogresses anyway--we may as well be amused ogresses."

They had an adventure all to themselves that night. A little party of people pa.s.sed them talking French, and bound like themselves for a stroll to the end of the breakwater. There were two ladies and two men, and in the latter Val felt certain she recognised the boys from Shai-poo. Behind them, at a little distance, smoking a deliciously fragrant cigar and humming cheerfully after the manner of a Frenchman who has just enjoyed a good dinner, strolled a third man, evidently belonging to the party, for he called out an occasional remark to the others. All disappeared into the blackness at the far end of the pier, where a lamp and storm-bell were built into a little chapel-shaped shelter. Val and Harriott, deciding not to walk farther, seated themselves by dint of a certain amount of physical exertion upon the high wall which runs beside the _digue_, their legs dangling, the sea below, the cool black night all round them. By and by the French party returned in the order of their going, the last man still lagging behind.

He had perhaps lingered longer than the others to watch the seas dashing against the bulky end of the pier, for the advance party pa.s.sed some five minutes before his cheerful humming was heard. As he came along a pale streak of gold from the far lighthouse swept over him, revealing him an elderly, distinguished man of the _Legion d'honneur_ type. Val immediately recognised in him the man whom Haidee had pointed out as General Lorrain, the father of Sacha: he of the American boots and pointed goatee.

"Ah! Le phare est tres chic ce soir!" He called out suddenly. He had seen them in the same sweeping line of light, but it never occurred to them that he mistook them for the ladies of his party until he came up and gave Harriott an affectionate squeeze on her ankle, repeating his remark:

"_N'est ce pas_, Comtesse--it gives a very _chic_ illumination to-night, the lighthouse?"

Mrs. Kesteven gave a very _chic_ gasp, and almost leaped from the wall into the sea below. And Val, realising what had happened, hastily leaned forward and in her bad French, always ten times worse when she was excited, cried:

"_Mais--vous faisez une erreur, monsieur._"

The poor man, horrified as Mrs. Kesteven herself, blurted out a throaty:

"_Parr-don! Je vous demands parr-don, mesdames,_" and fled.

Val said her French did it--that wonderful phrase "_faisez une erreur_,"

quite unknown to the French grammar. But Harriott declared her suspicion that the quality of her woollen stockings was the cause of the poor man's panic.

"I imagine the French Comtesse whom that pinch was meant for is not much addicted to Jaeger and flannel lingerie," she said with a grim glint of humour in her eye. "Anyway it is a lesson to us not to sit out alone on dark nights."

Next morning there was a basket of grapes in the boat.

"This is really beginning to go a little too far," declared Val.

"Either some one is robbing the Admiral's garden and wants to drag us into the affair as accomplices, or else there is an impression abroad that we are in need of food and clothing."

She and Harriott gravely discussed the point as to whether it would be better to put up a public notice by the wayside, or call in the gendarmes.