Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/246

 Madame Gigon peered at her with dim eyes. "I've been thinking how lucky I am."

Lily smiled.

"I mean that I'm not left poor and alone. You've been good to me."

Lily's smile expanded into a laugh. "Nonsense. . . . Nonsense. It's given me enough pleasure. . . ."

"It seems like the hand of God," said the old woman very piously.

"It may be," said Lily. "Mees Ellen has been telling me it's the hand of man."

And Madame Gigon, not having heard the talk on the terrace, was puzzled. Secretly she disapproved Mees Ellen's lack of piety.

"Mees Ellen plays well this morning . . . beautifully," said Madame Gigon. "She is an artist . . . a true artist. Will you ask her a favor?"

Lily nodded.

"Will you ask her to play something of Offenbach? I've been hungry for it." She looked feeble and appealing, somewhat confused by violence of the life with which she found herself surrounded since the advent of Mees Ellen and the grown-up Jean.

"Of course," said Lily.

"And one more thing," said Madame Gigon. "This I must ask of you. . . . I'm too ill to go to Madame Blaise this afternoon. I want you to go and explain why I have not come. Tell her I am too ill." A slight frown crossed Lily's brow. Madame Gigon, with her dim eyes could not possibly have seen it, yet she said, "Madame Blaise admires you. . . . She thinks you are all that a woman should be . . . a perfect woman."

If Lily had felt any genuine hesitation, the faint flattery destroyed it, for she replied. "I'll go, certainly. I'm lunching out and I'll go there late and tell her."

"Not too late. . . . She is easily offended," said Madame Gigon. "You know she is a little . . ." She made a comic gesture indicating that Madame Blaise was a little cracked.

Then Lily read to her for a time out of Faure's History of