Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/203

Rh the same case. You have saved your round white neck, or it has been saved for you, by not so much as the thickness of Zamet’s pie-crust—I declare my mouth is beginning to water for it!—and instead of being thankful and making the best of things, you are thinking of poor Madame d’Yverne, or dreaming of your calf-love!”

The girl’s face—for a girl she was, though they called her Madame—began to work. She struggled a moment with her emotion, and then broke down, and fell to weeping silently. For two days she had sat in public and not given way. But the reference to her lover was too much for her strength.

Madame St. Lo looked at her with eyes which were not unkindly.

“Sits the wind in that quarter?” she murmured. “I thought so! But there, my dear, if you don’t put that packet in your gown you’ll wash out the address! Moreover, if you ask me, I don’t think the young man is worth it. It is only that what we have not got—we want!”

But the young Countess had borne to the limit of her powers. With an incoherent word she rose to her feet, and walked hurriedly away. The thought of what was and of what might have been, the thought of the lover who still—though he no longer seemed, even to her, the perfect hero—held a place in her heart, filled her breast to overflowing. She longed for some spot where she could weep unseen; where the sunshine and the blue sky would not mock her grief; and seeing in front of her a little clump of alders, which grew beside the stream, in a bend that in winter was marshy, she hastened towards it.

Madame St. Lo saw her figure blend with the shadow of the trees.

“Quite à la Ronsard, I give my word!” she murmured. “And now she is out of sight! La, la! I could play at the game myself, and carve sweet sorrow on the barks of