Part 80

"Prizes, Monsieur?"

"The golden apple and the prix de la sagesse?"

She laughed and blushed, detaching from her corsage a rosebud.

"Accept, Monsieur, the prize for eloquence and for impudence!" And she extended the rosebud to Warner.

He took it, lifted it to his lips, looking smilingly at her, and listening with all the concentration he could summon to the murmuring conversation at the neighboring table.

Only a word or two he could catch--perhaps merely a guess at--"Patron," and "nine o'clock," and "cellar"--at least he imagined he could distinguish these words. And all the time he was up to his ears in a breezy flirtation with a girl very willing, very adept, and perfectly capable of appreciating her own desirability as well as the good points of any casual suitor whom Heaven might strand upon her little, isolated island for an hour or two.

Being French, she was clever and amusing and sufficiently grateful to the gods for this bit of masculine flotsam which had drifted her way.

"There are boats," she said, "and the evening will be beautiful." Having made this clear to him, she smiled and let matters shape their course.

"What pleasure is a boat and a beautiful night to me," he said, "if nobody shares both with me?"

"Alas, Monsieur, have you no pretty little friend who could explain to you the planets on a summer night?"

"Alas, Mademoiselle!"

"What a pity.... Because I have studied astronomy a little. And I recommend it to you as a diversion. They are so high, so unattainable, the stars! It is well for a young man to learn what is attainable, and then to address himself to its pursuit. What do you think, Monsieur?"

"That I should very much like to study astronomy if in all the world there could be discovered anybody amiable enough to teach me."

"How pathetic! If I only had time----"

"Have you no time at all?"

"It wouldn't do, mon ami."

"Why?"

"Because I should be seen going to a rendezvous with you."

"Isn't there any way into the cabaret garden except through the cabaret?" he asked.

She shook her head, laughing at him out of her brown eyes.

He waited a moment to control his voice, but there was a tremor in it when he said:

"Is there no way through the cellar?"

She noticed the tremor and liked it. In the lightest and airiest of flirtations the ardent and unsteady note in a man's voice appeals to any woman to continue and finish his subjugation.

"As for the cellar," she said, "it is true that one can get into the cabaret garden that way. But, Monsieur, do you imagine that a dark, damp, ghostly and pitch-black cellar appeals to any woman?"

"Is the cellar so frightful a place, Mademoiselle?"

"Figure it to yourself!--Some twenty stone steps from the pantry yonder"--She nodded her head toward the battered swinging door of leather.--"And then more steps, down, down, down!--Into darkness and dampness where there are only wine casks and kegs and bottles and mushrooms and rats and ghosts----"

"What of it--if, as you say, the stars are shining on the river----"

"Merci! A girl must certainly be in love to venture through that cellar! And a man, too!"