“I am so glad you came to stay with me, Peggy.  But you are dressed; why did you not go?”

“I am hiding.”

“What are you hiding from?”

“Jules Vigo, of course.”

“Poor Jules.”

“Yes, you are always saying poor this and that, after you set them on by rejecting them.  They run about like blind, mad oxen till they bump their stupid heads against somebody that will have them.  I shouldn’t wonder if I got a second-hand husband one day, taking up with some cast-off of yours.”

“Peggy, these things do not flatter me; they distress me,” said Angelique genuinely.

“They wouldn’t distress me.  If I had your face, and your hands and arms, and the way you carry yourself, I’d love to kill men.  They have no sense at all.”

Angelique heard her grind her teeth, and exclaimed,—­

“Why, Peggy, what has poor Jules done?”

“Oh, Jules!—­he is nothing.  I have just engaged myself to him to get rid of him, and now I have some right to be let alone.  He’s only the fourth one of your victims that I’ve accepted, and doctored up, and set on foot again.  I take them in rotation, and let them easily down to marrying some girl of capacity suitable to them.  And until you are married off, I have no prospect of ever being anything but second choice.”

Angelique laughed.

“Your clever tongue so fascinates men that this is all mockery, your being second choice.  But indeed I like men, Peggy; if they had not the foolishness of falling in love.”

“Angelique Saucier, when do you intend to settle in life?”

“I do not know,” said the French girl slowly.  “It is pleasant to be as we are.”

Peggy glanced at her through the dark.

“Do you intend to be a nun?”

“No, I have no vocation.”

“Well, if you don’t marry, the time will come when you’ll be called an old maid.”

“That is what mama says.  It is a pity to make ugly names for good women.”

“I’ll be drawn and quartered before I’ll be called an old maid,” said Peggy fiercely.  “What difference does it make, after all, which of these simpletons one takes for a husband?  Were you ever in love with one of them, Angelique?”

Peggy had the kind of eyes which show a disk of light in the dark, and they revealed it as she asked this question.

“No, I think not,” answered Angelique.

“You think not.  You believe, to the best of your knowledge and recollection, that such a thing has never happened to you,” mocked Peggy.  And then she made a sudden pounce at Angelique’s arm.  “What was the matter with you when you ran up the gallery steps, a minute ago?”

The startled girl drew in her breath with surprise, but laughed.

“It was lighter then,” hinted Peggy.

“Did you see him?”

“Yes, I saw him.  And I saw you coaxing him along with a bunch of roses, for all the world like catching a pony with a bunch of grass.  And I saw him careering back to neigh in your face.”