"
"Yes."
Sylvia volunteered no information about that book.
"You brought it down to the sands. So I suppose you never noticed a
strange-looking couple who passed along the deal boards just in front of
us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But
during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A
middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure
like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable
bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on.
"There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned as himself.
But you didn't see them? I never saw anything so ludicrous as that
couple, austere and provincial as their clothes, walking along the deal
boards between the rows of smart people." Mrs. Thesiger laughed as she
recalled the picture. "They must have come from the Provinces. I could
imagine them living in a chateau on a hill overlooking some tiny village
in--where shall we say?" She hesitated for a moment, and then with an air
of audacity she shot the word from her lips--"in Provence."
The name, however, had evidently no significance for Sylvia, and Mrs.
Thesiger was relieved of her fears.
"But you didn't see them," she repeated, with a laugh.
"Yes, I did," said Sylvia, and brought her mother up on her elbow again.
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