Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/256



EIL after veil, deepening as it descended towards the valley, the dusk was dropping between the forest arches. All the great wind had fallen and the twilight air was calm. As Graham walked down the winding road, a strange effect followed upon his anger and bewilderment. It was as if the evening, with death-like, gentle hands, soothed them away, and his soul was dispossessed of all the magic that had so tormented and intoxicated him. He had the feeling of awakening from a dream. There was hardly a root of living fact in his memory that might resist the chill, soft effacement. It had all been a dream; all except those moments on the island; so near that when he thought of them it was only as a knocking at his heart that they returned; a thrush's notes; a white hand from which the mallet dropped.

Why had he been so angry? The old lady had been right. She had seen the truth to which he had been blinding himself all these days and she had warned him. If she had been glad to warn him, if there had been vindictiveness in the impulse, that did not condemn her. He had given her too much to bear. If she were jealous, malevolent, untruthful, in this she had been right—to him; to Jill; and to her protégée.

Mademoiselle Ludérac's figure passed through his