Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/196

 Who ever heard of anything so wild! Is that what people are saying? Oh, why!" she laughed out in her amazement, "she hardly knew him by sight."

"Why," said the man evidently not speaking to Jeanne, "didn't you say that she ran down along the bank of the river, screaming that he had killed himself for her sake?"

"Yes, I said that," answered another man's voice, astonished and on the defense, "and she did too! and when the body was pulled out she flung herself down on it, and shrieked that she wanted to die with him."

Jeanne broke in now, at the top of her voice, calling Heaven and earth and all the saints to witness that she never heard of anything so preposterous in her life, and that anybody in Bayonne could tell them so, and what crazy stories would people be making up next out of whole cloth? "Some one is trying to play a joke on M. l'Inspecteur from Saint Sauveur. Nobody could have heard our Madame say such things, because she couldn't possibly have said them, any more than she could about a clerk who sold her a yard of cloth over the counter. For she didn't know any more about the young man than that! Why, she never knew him except as the son of one of her friends. He never came to the house, and more than that she hadn't even laid eyes on him for more than two years. He had been in America and is only just returned, day before yesterday. Anybody you ask here can tell you that."

"Nom de Dieu!" said the first man's voice in extreme surprise. "Hadn't seen him for two years!"

"No, he hasn't even been in France since he was a little young boy!" The first man laughed as though the joke were on his comrade.

The second man's voice said, still defending himself, but now uncertainly, "Very queer his following her right up there, if he scarcely knew her—what was he doing in Saint Sauveur at this season, I'd like to know, if not …"

"Oh, as to that," said Jeanne carelessly, "I happen to know why he was there. I saw the young monsieur day before yesterday, just as he was about to take the seven o'clock train,