Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/122

 Oh, no; we are cruel in those ways—as in all else; but you cannot say while such things are done in England that the English, too, are not cruel.'

Insensibly, in speaking, her voice had lost its tranquillity and, listening with a bewildered and sinking heart, Jill knew that tranquillity with Mademoiselle Ludérac was an achievement rather than a characteristic. Her words came now impetuously, rapidly, heaping themselves up, as her breath gave way at the end of each sentence, as though, Jill felt, she were about to break into tears. And her own distress, her own discomfiture was so deep, that, trying to gain time, trying to think out a way of escape, she began again to stroke the cat, so that her hand touched Mademoiselle Ludérac's and, looking up with those potent, those dwelling eyes, Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled faintly at her, asking pardon, it was evident, for so much intemperateness.

Jill found her voice at last. 'I've got something to tell you,' she said. She hardly knew how to bring out her confession. The context in which her beloved sport had been presented to her so bewildered her that she had difficulty in grasping the exculpations. 'You'll think I'm like all the others. I am, I suppose.—I hunt foxes,' said Jill. 'I've hunted them all my life.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac gazed at her with no change of countenance.

'I've always tried not to think about the foxes, because I'm not really cruel; at least I think not. I leve