"I will in a moment," he replied, "but not just yet. I must speak to you, Fernande--just for a few minutes.... Will you turn to me and put down those tools a while? Upon my soul, it is passing serious ... Fernande!" he reiterated more earnestly, seeing that with strange obstinacy the young girl still kept her head resolutely bent to her work. But at his insistence she threw down her tools and straightened her young figure. "What is it?" she queried as she faced him, with a mocking glance in her blue eyes. He took her hand, which for just the space of a second she tried to free from his grasp. "Fernande," he said in a tender tone of appeal, "you are not angry with me, are you?" "Angry? You foolish Laurent!" she retorted gently. "Why should I be angry?" "You did not mean all that you said at table?" he insisted. "What did I say?" "You implied by your words that ... that it was not within my rights to control your actions." "Well," she asked, holding her tiny head a little to one side, and giving him an arch look of coquetry from beneath her long lashes, "is it?" "Fernande," he entreated. "Well, what is it?" "You don't know how you hurt me, when you speak so flippantly. If you only knew how every word from your dear lips sinks into my heart! The cruel words make it ache so that I could cry out with the pain ... and one sweet word from you makes me so happy that I would not exchange this earth for the most glorious corner of paradise." "Dear, foolish Laurent!" she sighed. Indeed, her heart was, as usual, inexpressibly touched by his ardour. She could see that his eyes were moist with unshed tears. She allowed him to take both her hands and to draw her nearer to him; she did not protest when anon his arm stole round her waist, and he buried his face against her shoulder. Indeed, she felt a wonderful fondness at this moment for the companion of her youth, the playmate of her childhood in the far-off days in England, when they were all poor and wretched together and had only each other to cling to, to trust, to look to for solace and for sympathy. She felt his burning kiss upon her neck, and with her small hand she stroked his hair and patted his cheek with a tender, almost maternal gesture. The day was fast drawing in. The softness of the night--of a spring night laden with the fragrance of opening buds and ripening blossom--wrapped the sweet tangle of young growth in its embrace. The lilac and the hawthorn were weighted with April rain, overhead the branches of a young lime quivered in the evening breeze ere it sent down a shower of scented drops upon the two young people who were clinging to one another in the pure embrace of budding love. The mating birds in the branches of the old elms had already gone to rest; from far away came the monotonous croaking of frogs and the soft call of the wood-pigeons from the tangled woodland close by. "Fernande," reiterated Laurent with growing intensity, "you do love me, do you not?"