Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/134

 You really must take care,' Jill smiled at him tenderly, 'or you'll get barmy.'

'Not with you to take care of me,' Graham smiled back. 'Go on with your story. You're full of it, I see.'

'Well, I don't want to upset you.'

'Upset me? I'm not upset,' said Graham. 'I'm only interested in the tricks my imagination can play me. Go on, Jill.'

'Well, the mother couldn't bear to be without her and fell into frenzies if Marthe left her.—Imagine what a life for a child, Dick.—And they were stoned once, here, in Buissac. That is like a saint, too, isn't it?'

Graham kept silence.

'It explains everything; everything one felt about her from the first,' said Jill. 'The grave—mad people are buried alone like that, perhaps;—and her coldness to you. And the feeling she gives one that she is set apart. She told me that she had never had a friend.'

Graham determinedly reacted against his impressionable mood. He tossed away his cigarette and lighted another and inquired, 'Does it really make her more amiable that she should have been so very unfortunate? It seems to me that the old lady has shown a good deal of courage in taking up such an unpopular person. I shouldn't have expected it of her, somehow. It makes one like her better. But it doesn't make me like her protégée the better that she shouldn't count her as a friend.'