"She can't. She's gone to Nice to see her aunt. So she told me at breakfast----" "Gone to Nice!" came in a chorus of irrepressible ecstasy. "If she would only _stay_ at Nice." "Too good to be true!" complained a male voice, that Dorris conjectured to be that of a certain Major Norris, whom she had more than once publicly appropriated as lawful spoil of her charms, and inveigled into winding and solitary walks alone with her. "Couldn't somebody persuade her that Nice is the only spot on earth for the complexion?" asked one. "She'd swallow any rot. That story of the frogs--feeding the conscripts with frogs to give them courage! Too bad to stuff her like that," said another. "Surely you must acknowledge that the presence of our young friend at least makes for mirth at table," reproved the thin man's plaintive tones. "You hypocritical old owl, you!" muttered Dorris, clenching her small fists and twisting them as if a gentle fancy had involved them in Mr. Welbourne's hair, which was artistically grown. "Say," cried Mrs. Dinwiddie with sudden inspiration, "what was M. Isidore's _mot_ on the Boundrish gell?" "Ah! M. Isidore's _mot_," echoed Ermengarde, "how did it run?" "To be sure, M. Isidore's _mot_," went from mouth to mouth, ending in a general shout of laughter and ejaculations of ecstasy; but what the _mot_ was poor Dorris never heard, for the simple and sufficient reason that M. Isidore was entirely innocent of having so much as imagined one, and was at that moment bending over the rose-covered rail above the path, with gesticulations expressive of mingled delight and resentment at the liberty taken with his name, to the great joy of Bertie Trevor, who made gestures of defiance at him in return. At this, M. Isidore, shaking his head as if in despair of the group below, turned his attention to Dorris--whom he could see through a chink in the rye-straw partition, and whose reception of public incense he had watched with tender, if spasmodic, interest from time to time--and was rewarded by perceiving symptoms of severe internal perturbation in the fair lady's demeanour. The good-hearted little man had substantial and most bitter cause to dislike Dorris and all her ways; few things would have given him greater satisfaction than her instant and final disappearance from Les Oliviers, from France, from any and every place in which he might henceforth walk all his life long; but he had a heart and a soft one; he had also a French tenderness for the smaller woes of women, and what he saw through the chink smote him with such compunction that he left his seeds, leapt lightly down from the platform and ran round to the path, where the group of traducers were loitering, holding out his hands in appeal. "Mais, mais, mesdames, messieurs! c'est un peu fort!" he cried; "does one talk so of ladies?" "We were only admiring the dear girl's little ways," Ermengarde explained, "and her beauty."