Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/204

 the way Jeanne saw things. With all her immature personality, with the pitiably insufficient weapons of a little girl, Marise had fought not to accept Jeanne's way of seeing things. That had been the real cause of their quarrels. But now the weapons were struck from her hands. Jeanne had been right all the time it seemed. That was the way things really were. Now she knew. With a long breath she admitted her defeat.

"No, specially not Papa," she whispered.

It was four o'clock that afternoon. They had had something to eat, talking quietly about indifferent things, and they had found Papa's address in Bordeaux and sent a telegram to him, before Marise thought to ask, "But, Mademoiselle, how is it you can be out of your class-room to-day?" She had ofteE known the teacher to drag herself to work when she was scarcely able to stand, and knew how the stern discipline of her profession frowned on an absence from duty.

"Oh, I arranged this morning to have a substitute come. I heard—I heard your maman was not well, and I knew your papa was not here, and I wasn't sure that any of your maman's friends might be able to come to look out for you."

As a matter of fact, Marise never saw one of her mother's callers again. That evening, Anna brought up a blue telegram from Papa, which since it had been sent in English, as Papa always insisted on doing, was perfectly unintelligible, reading:

"Com inga nmorninjtrain ta kigo adca rof Maman."

Papa.

Marise who had with Maman puzzled over many other similar telegrams from Papa, made out "morning-train" and that was enough.

The doctor had sent in a nursing sister to take care of Jeanne during the night, and Isabelle had gone off to a tenement near the Porte d'Espagne where some relations of hers lived and had brought back an old cousin to help her with