Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/258

 cent Jill. Never had he loved her as he loved her now, urged towards her by self-scorn; and by that sense of a dark reek on the air, the taint in his nostrils for which Jill's limpidity, as of mountain freshness, would be the antidote. Dear normal Jill, of earth and air and water. Let him never again wander after the infernal brightness of strange goddesses. Let dear earth suffice him.

Jill was asleep when he went in. She lay on her pillow, her cheek turned to her hand, and looked, with her tossed locks and parted lips, like a very young child. He bent over her, tenderly smiling, while tears rose to his eyes.

When she awoke, she asked him no question about his afternoon. That would have been strange, were it not that she was really ill, and the fever ran high that night. But she smiled dimly and gratefully upon him while he nursed her, and he felt that if any shadow had lurked he would have seen it.

He hardly left her for three days. When he went out, it was to walk in the opposite direction from the Manoir, up towards the river gorges, and deep relief was in him for the blessed interlude. It was only as the fever left her, as the days passed on, that he began to wonder at her silence; and to ask himself if she wondered at his. Jill did not even ask him why he was not going on with Madame de Lamouderie's portrait.

She could sit up now in bed, and knit and write letters, and he read aloud to her. It might have been a very happy time had it not been for the sense of tension, even of breathlessness, that affected him. It was