"We'll call those words unsaid, dear cousin," she said softly. "I know, alas! that between your political aims and our own there is an abyss of divergent ideals! You and your party have the power now--we are humbled and helpless--and must, therefore, rely on your generosity not to embitter the joy which we felt when we trod once again the soil of our beloved country, after years of poverty and of exile." "Protestations would come ill from me," he murmured. "You would scorn them--and justly, too--after my unwarrantable transgression." "You will have to be patient with us, _mon cousin_. We may have erred in the past, we may be foolish and misguided now, but you must try and remember always that every one of our actions is guided solely by our love of France--by the burning patriotism which helped us to endure exile and untold misery for the sake of our beliefs and of our aspirations. Mistaken we may be; but until you have heard the advocacy of our cause, I pray you do not judge us as harshly as you have obviously been led to do." "Mademoiselle Fernande...." "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?" "If you will let me." 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.