Mademoiselle seemed neither to see nor to hear Mrs. Allonby. Looking coldly at the embarrassed and apologetic Isidore, she said with a kind of weary calm, "Maman is still waiting," turned and walked away with her usual haughty bearing, and sank out of sight down the steep path, pursued, after a moment of despairing gesture, in which his hair suffered, and a wild exclamation of, "Mon Dieu! je l'avais oubliée, cette vieille!" by M. Isidore, to the mingled amusement and regret of Ermengarde, who justly divined that the charm of her society had beguiled the unfortunate youth into forgetfulness of the hour of some domestic duty, and that his reception at the hotel might be stormy. "He really is a very dear boy," she reflected, leaning back against the gnarled pine-trunk, and watching the shadows fill hollow and ravine with vague blueness and the upward slanting sunlight steep the mountain peaks in crimson and rose, while the hushed sea grew bluer than its own incredible blue, and the clear, deep sky took a violet tinge. "How on earth did this boy come to be born in this small hotel-keeper class? He has the bearing of a prince, the instincts of a knight of romance, and the charm of a gallant child. And then to be sulked at and called over the coals by a girl like Geneviève, and at the beck and call of a woman like this Madame Bontemps!" The situation was odious, impossible. She wished the poor boy were her son. When youngish women--women under thirty--find themselves wishing to be the mothers of full-grown and fascinating youths, they should at once begin to think as hard as possible of something else. Instead of this, Mrs. Allonby went on thinking how this young Isidore might be her son. He could not be more than twenty-one, certainly; it was hardly possible to be a mother at seven--but at seventeen? Had she been born just ten years earlier, the thing would have been not only possible, but probable. She might have been forcibly married to some unpleasant elderly person at sixteen--some foreign vicomte, who, after a few years, would have conveniently and politely died, leaving her in the bloom of youth, free and rich, as they do in French novels.