Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/407

Rh he might have found his goddess a stern judge. … And she smiled with bitter melancholy.

The Major, when he came to go away, as she walked out with him to the carriage, took her hand and looked wistfully at her, and said:

"You're not looking well, Teresa."

"Oh, I'm quite well," she said in surprise.

The Major shook his head.

"No, you're not," he said, and she caught again that look of troubled apprehension in his eyes.

Basil, who was going to take the Major home, looked at her too, a sudden quick scrutiny, but he said nothing.

Ronald came to kiss his grandfather good-bye, and Teresa, too, kissed him; and as she leaned over the gate and watched the carriage drive away down the darkening road, it seemed to her that all the world was sinking in decay: the old man there, the fading sunset that she saw through leafless trees, her own fading life. For the Major was quite right—the strain of the last weeks was beginning to show in her face. The colour and the life had died out of it, under the freeezing [sic] pressure of pain and dread.