There was no such specific understanding between Jeanne and Victorine.  From some perverse and roguish impulse the girl chose to take no counsel in this game she had begun to play; but each woman knew that the other comprehended the situation perfectly.

When Victorine came into the dining-room to serve Willan Blaycke’s supper, she looked, to his eyes, prettier than ever.  She wore the same white gown and black silk apron with crimson lace she had worn before.  Her cheeks and her eyes were bright from the excitement of the serenading and counter-serenading in which she had been engaged.  Her whole bearing was an inimitable blending of shyness and archness, tempered by almost reverential respect.  Willan Blaycke would have been either more or less than mortal man if he had resisted it.  He did not,—­he succumbed then and there and utterly to his love for Victorine; and the next morning when breakfast was ready he electrified Victor Dubois by saying, with a not wholly successful attempt at jocularity,—­

“Look you! your man tells me I am like to be kept here a matter of some three days or more, before my horse be fit to bear me.  Now, it irks me to be the cause of so much trouble, seeing that I am the only traveller in the house.  I pray you that I may sit down with you all at meal-times, as is your wont, and that you make no change in the manner of your living by reason of my being in the house.  I shall be better pleased so.”

There was about as much command as request in Willan’s manner; and after some pretended hesitancy Victor yielded, only saying, by way of breaking down the last barrier,—­

“My daughter hath desired not to see thee.  I know not how she may take this request of thine; it seemeth but reasonable unto me, and it will be that saving of work for her.  I think she may consent.”

Nothing but her love for Victorine would have induced Jeanne to sit again at meat with her stepson, but for Victorine’s sake Jeanne would have done much harder things; and indeed, after the first few moments of awkwardness had passed by, she found that she was much less uncomfortable in Willan’s presence than she had anticipated.

Willan’s own manner did much to bring this about.  He was so deeply in love with Victorine that it had already transformed his sentiments on most points, and on none more than in regard to Jeanne.  He thought no better of her character than he had thought before; but he found himself frequently recollecting, as he had never done before, or at least had never done in a kindly way, that, after all, she had been his father’s wife for ten years, and it would perhaps have been a more dignified thing in him to have attempted to make her continue in a style of living suitable to his father’s name than to have relegated her, as he had done, to her original and lower social station.

Jeanne’s behavior towards him was very judicious.  Affection is the best teacher of tact in many an emergency in life; we see it every day among ignorant and untaught people.