"Well, sometimes I don't think they do, but at others they seem to rankle. But, look, isn't that Mr Pradelle coming?" For answer Louise caught her friend's hand to hurry her out of the room before Pradelle entered. CHAPTER ELEVEN. AUNT MARGUERITE STUDIES A COMEDY. That morning after breakfast Aunt Marguerite sat by her open window in her old-fashioned French _peignoir_. She saw Pradelle go out, and she smiled and beamed as he turned to look up at her window, and raised his hat before proceeding down into the back lanes of the port, to inveigle an urchin into the task of obtaining for him a pot of ragworms for bait. Soon after she saw her nephew go out, but he did not raise his head. On the contrary, he bent it down, and heaved up his shoulders like a wet sailor, as he went on to his office. "_Mon pauvre enfant_!" she murmured, as she half-closed her eyes, and kissed the tips of the fingers. "Just wait a while, Henri, _mon enfant_, and all shall be well." There was a lapse of time devoted to thought, and then Aunt Marguerite's eyes glistened with malice as she saw Madelaine approach. "Pah!" she ejaculated softly. "This might be Amsterdam or the Boompjes. Wretched Dutch wench! How can George tolerate her presence here?" Then Pradelle came back, but he did not look up this time, merely went to the door and entered, his eyes looking searchingly about as if in search of Louise. Lastly, a couple of particularly unseamanlike men, dressed in shiny tarpaulin hats and pea-jackets, with earrings and very smooth pomatumy hair, came into sight. Each man carried a pack and a big stick, and as they drew near their eyes wandered over window and door in a particularly searching way. They did not come to the front, but in a slouching, furtive way went past the front of the house, and round to the back, where the next minute there was a new tapping made by the knob of a stick on a door, and a moment later a buzzing murmur of voices arose. Aunt Marguerite had nothing whatever to do, and the murmur interested her to the extent of making her rise, go across her room, and through a door at the back into her bed-chamber, where an open lattice window had a chair beneath, and the said window being just over the back entrance from whence the murmur came. Aunt Marguerite had nothing to do but go and sit down there unseen, and hear every word that was said. "Yes," said the familiar voice of brown-faced, black-haired Liza; "they're beautiful, but I haven't got the money." "That there red ribbon'd just soot you, my lass," said a deep voice, so fuzzy that it must have come from under a woollen jacket. "Just look at that there hankychy, too," said another deep voice. "Did you ever see a better match?" "Never," said the other deep voice emphatically. "Yes, they're very lovely, but I ain't got the money. I let mother have all I had this week."