She spoke rapidly, as if she were in great haste to be gone, and with averted eyes.  And at the end she turned away without any word of farewell, but Ste. Marie started after her.  He cried: 

“Coira!  Coira!” And when she stopped, he said:  “Coira, I can’t let you go like this!  Are we to—­simply to go our different ways like this, as if we’d never met at all?”

“What else?” said the girl.

And there was no answer to that.  Their separate ways were determined for them—­marked plain to see.

“But afterward!” he cried.  “Afterward—­after we have got the boy back to his home!  What then?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “he will return to me.”  She spoke without any show of feeling.  “Perhaps he will return.  If not—­well, I don’t know.  I expect my father and I will just go on as we’ve always gone.  We’re used to it, you know.”

After that she nodded to him and once more turned away.  Her face may have been a very little pale, but, as before, it betrayed no feeling of any sort.  So she went up under the trees to the house, and Ste. Marie watched her with strained and burning eyes.

When, half an hour later, he followed, he came unexpectedly upon the old Michel, who had entered the park through the little wooden door in the wall, and was on his way round to the kitchen with sundry parcels of supplies.  He spoke a civil “Bon jour, Monsieur,” and Ste. Marie stopped him.  They were out of sight from the windows.  Ste. Marie withdrew from his pocket one of the hundred-franc notes, and the single, beadlike eye of the ancient gnome fixed upon it and seemed to shiver with a fascinated delight.

“A hundred francs!” said Ste. Marie, unnecessarily, and the old man licked his withered lips.  The tempter said:  “My good Michel, would you care to receive this trifling sum—­a hundred francs?”

The gnome made a choked, croaking sound in his throat.

“It is yours,” said Ste. Marie, “for a small service—­for doing nothing at all.”

The beadlike eye rose to his and sharpened intelligently.

“I desire only,” said he, “that you should sleep well to-night, very well—­without waking.”

“Monsieur,” said the old man, “I do not sleep at all.  I watch.  I watch Monsieur’s windows.  Monsieur O’Hara watches until midnight, and I watch from then until day.”

“Oh, I know that,” said the other.  “I’ve seen you more than once in the moonlight, but to-night, mon vieux, slumber will overcome you.  Exhaustion will have its way and you will sleep.  You will sleep like the dead.”

“I dare not!” cried the gardener.  “Monsieur, I dare not!  The old one would kill me.  You do not know him.  He would cut me into pieces and burn the pieces.  Monsieur, it is impossible.”

Ste. Marie withdrew the other hundred-franc note and held the two together in his hand.  Once more the gnome made his strange, croaking sound and the withered face twisted with anguish.