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Mamzelle Maryette, if I should swear to you that he is on his third chicken and that a row of six pint bottles of ’93 Margaux stand empty on the cloth at his elbow, I should do no penance for untruthfulness. Tenez, Mamzelle Maryette, regardez un peu par l’oubliette " And old Julie slid open the wooden shutter on the crack and Maryette bent forward and surveyed the dining room outside.
The quick colour reddened his face and powerful neck. The girl had been right; her smile had been an answer that he was not going to ignore. "What a pretty spot for a lavoir," he said, stepping to the edge of the pool; "and what a pretty girl to adorn it!" Maryette tossed her head: "Be pleased to pass your way, monsieur. Do you not perceive that I am busy?"
"Where’s Maryette?" he demanded. Smith jerked a silent thumb toward the ceiling. "In bed?" "Or prayin’." Burley flushed, hesitated. "G’wan up, anyway," said Glenn. "I reckon it’ll do her a heap o’ good to lamp you, you old son of a gun!" Burley turned, went up the short flight of stairs to her closed door. There was candle-light shining through the transom. He knocked with a trembling hand.
After luncheon, agreeably satiated, they rose from the table in the little dining room and strolled out to the garden in the rear of the inn, their Mexican spurs clanking. Maryette heard them; they tipped their caps to her; she acknowledged their salute gravely and continued to cultivate her garden with a hoe, the blond, consumptive Belgian trundling a rickety cultivator at her heels.
The room was filled with the soft, velvety roar of whirring wings beating on wall and ceiling and against the tumbler where Madam Death sat imprisoned, quivering her wings, her eyes two molten rubies, and the ghastly skull staring from her back. How Maryette ever brought herself to do it; how she did it at last, she had no very clear idea.
At intervals, too, he turned his head with that peculiar movement of the old, and peered at his daughter, Maryette, and the Belgian gardener who were working among the potatoes in the garden.
Cautiously Maryette bent forward and dropped both hands on the moth.
Sticky Smith, off duty and having filled himself to repletion with café-au-lait at the inn, volunteered to act as nurse, attendant, remover of fish and baiter of hook, while Maryette was absent at the stone-rimmed pool where the washing of all Sainte Lesse laundry had been accomplished for hundreds of years.
"Will you tell me your name in exchange for mine?" "Maryette Courtray." "Oh," he exclaimed in quick recognition; "you are bell-mistress in Sainte Lesse, then! You are the celebrated carillonnette! I have heard about you. I suspected that you might be the little mistress of Sainte Lesse bells, because you wear the Legion " He nodded his handsome head toward the decoration on her blouse.
Stick an’ me, we just took a few drinks, but Maryette, soon as she got home, she just flopped down on her knees and asked that china virgin of hers to go easy on that there Fritz " They had conducted Burley to the bar; both their arms were draped around his shoulders; both talked to him at the same time. "This here Fritz," began Glenn but Burley freed himself from their embrace.
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