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The irksomeness and restraint of his position began to wear on his nerves, and he cried aloud for something anything to happen rather than what he was enduring. Something happened. From between the Islands, there slowly appeared a great modern French ship of war, small in the distance. Hope lighted up the face of De Plonville.
He would not enter a club, he would abjure society, he would not speak to a woman he would, in short, be a hermit until his invention stood revealed before an astonished world. All of which goes to show that young De Plonville was not the conceited, meddlesome fop his acquaintances thought him. But in the large and small resolutions he did not deduct the ten per cent. for the unknown quantity.
Then at night it might be used as a sort of tent, or in a heavy rain it would form a temporary shelter. What do you think of the idea?" His friend had listened with half-closed eyes. He blew a whiff of cigarette smoke from his nostrils and answered: "It is wonderful, De Plonville," he said drawlingly. "Its possibilities are vast more so than even you appear to think.
He was well educated, and spoke three languages, that is, he spoke his own well and the other two badly, but as a man always prides himself on what he is least able to do, De Plonville fancied himself a linguist. His courage in speaking English to Englishmen and German to Germans showed that he was, at least, a brave man. There was a great deal of good and even of talent in De Plonville.
From the second ironclad arose a similar cloud, and this time far to his left there spurted up from the sea a jet of water, waving in the air like a plume for a moment, then dropping back in a shower on the ruffled surface. The buoy was a target! As De Plonville realized its use, he felt that uncomfortable creeping of the scalp which we call, the hair standing on end.
The girl had on a long opera cloak with some fluffy white material round the neck and down the front. A filmy lace arrangement rested lightly on her fair hair. It was the lady of the canoe glorified. Plonville wavered and was lost. He rushed to his room and donned his war paint. Say what you like, evening dress improves the appearance of a man.
Of course, the officers could do nothing but gnash their teeth, try to shoot better, and hope for a time to come when the Government then in power would be out, and they could find some tangible pretence for hanging young De Plonville from the yard-arm. All this has only a remote bearing upon this story, but we now come to a matter on which the story sinks or swims.
He thought that the vagaries of cannon-balls at sea would make an interesting study. "Are you injured?" cried a clear voice behind him. "Mon Dieu!" shouted the young man in a genuine fright, as he sprang to his feet. "Oh, I beg pardon," as if a rescuer need apologize, "I thought you were M. De Plonville." "I am De Plonville."
It is best to be as comfortable as possible under any circumstances, so De Plonville sat down on the spheroid and let his feet dangle toward the water. The great buoy for some reason floated around until it presented its side to the ships. None of the balls came so near as those first fired perhaps because of the accumulated smoke.
The name of the place came to him suddenly, and, as he stopped his march to and fro, De Plonville wondered why it had not suggested itself to him at the very first. Hyères! It seemed to have been planned in the Middle Ages for the perfecting of just such an invention.
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