“Is Marguerite gone out,” he asked, “with yonder polisson of the Court?”

“Thou knowest her, my friend,” answered Madame de Maufant, kindly; “ever since her mother’s death she has been a daughter to me.  But a sister is not a mother at the end of the account; and our little one will not be kept a prisoner.  She has learned English ideas in her girlhood, passed as you know with our London kinsfolk.  Once she is married her husband will find her faithful, in life and to the death.”

“Such freedoms are not according to our island ways.”

“Be not stupid, my good Alain.  Mr. Elliot is an old friend; though her dealings with him—­or with others—­be never so little to thy taste, I advertise thee to seek no cause of quarrel upon them; unless thou wouldst lose her altogether.”

“I do not understand how a girl that is promised can do such things.  Moreover, his coming here at all is what Michael would not find well.”

“He has done us a very friendly act in coming here, and has told us of a matter which it may cost him dear to have revealed.  For the rest, we can take very good care of ourselves.”

Alain was not a man of the world.  With something of a poet’s nature, he was born to be the slave of women.  Passionately attached to the mother who had brought him up—­and who was lately dead—­and wholly unacquainted with the coarser aspects of feminine character, he had a romantic ideal of womanhood.  The ladies in whose company he might chance to find himself were usually quick enough to discover this; and seeing him at their feet were always trampling upon him, reserving their wiles and fascinations for men who were more artful or less chivalrous.  The case was by no means singular in those days, and is believed to be occasionally reproduced even in more recent times.

He was now thoroughly annoyed; and Rose’s reasoning, far from composing his mind, had rendered it only the more anxious.  Therefore, when Marguerite returned into the parlour, with a somewhat heightened colour, Alain affected to take no notice of her, and sate gazing moodily at the fire.

“I have been plucking these roses,” said the girl, offering Alain a bunch of flowers wet with early dew.

He took them with a negligent air, stuck one of the buds into the band of his broad-brimmed hat that lay on the table, and allowed the rest to fall upon the rushes that strewed the stone floor.  Marguerite, with a slight and mocking grimace, watched the ill-tempered action without taking any audible notice of it.  Then resuming her seat, she took up her wool and needles and applied herself to her interrupted knitting.