Page:Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 2.djvu/38

20 permitted to strangers in America, he beat his breast and cried out, "My God, so beautiful and so cold! you do not comprehend that I am but a child. Pardon, and smile again I conjure you."

But Mademoiselle would not smile, and folding her hands in her cloak appeared to slumber. Whereat the gray-headed infant groaned pathetically, cast his eyes heavenward, and drank more ale, muttering to himself and shaking his head as if his emotions could not be entirely suppressed.

These proceedings caused Lavinia to keep her eye on him, being prepared for any outbreak from a bullet all round to proposals to both her charges at once.

With this smouldering bomb-shell inside, and the firm conviction that one if not all the trunks were lying in the dust some miles behind, it may be inferred that duenna Livy did not enjoy that break-neck drive, lurching and bumping up hill and down, with nothing between them and destruction apparently but the little humpback, who drove recklessly.

In this style they rattled up to the Porte de Brest, feeling that they had reached Dinan "only by the grace of God," as the beery man expressed it, when