Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/194

 She can never be so lonely again, now. Even if I have to leave her, she will know that I am there, and that I know, and love her.' And a beautiful sense of happiness, deeper, more beautiful, perhaps, than any she had ever felt, filled Jill's heart.

'No, there is no one like you,' she heard Marthe Ludérac say at last.

'Tell me about it. Don't you want to? Wouldn't it help? It's so dreadful to keep things to oneself always.'

A long time seemed to have passed, and as Jill questioned her thus, so gently, Marthe Ludérac took her hand and pressed it for a moment against her wet cheek, repeating. 'There is no one like you.'

'Will you tell me?' said Jill. 'Was she really mad? Or was that only what people thought.'

'No, she was not mad.' Helplessly, before Jill's tenderness, Marthe Ludérac suffered herself to be led forth, and her look, almost of astonishment, was indeed the look of one who can hardly believe in daylight. Wan with her tears, weak, gentle, she leaned on her hand and kept her eyes on Jill. 'Sometimes, the injury to her head gave her such pain that she became unconscious—or fell into a frenzy; but she was not really mad. That people thought her so was well for us; it gave us shelter.'

'But it kept people from you, dear Marthe.'

'But that was well. It was a veil, a cloak.—What could we have done with people?' said Marthe Ludérac in her weak, gentle voice.

'It must have been so lonely, so horribly lonely,'