Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/269

 fixed on the fire. He seemed to see her walking in the forest, her figure flitting from black to silver through the tree-trunks. It was a beautiful spring night. It would pour balm into her heart; and with a rush, as of wings, the harp notes of the Orpheus music went through his own.

'You look sad,' he heard himself saying; how long after the old lady's words he did not know.

'So do you,' she said quietly.

'Which is the saddest, I wonder,' Graham seemed to muse. 'Youth or age? Remembrance, or presage, which is worst?'

'But one does not escape presage when one is old. One can still fear, even when one is old,' said Madame de Lamouderie with her quiet.

'Can one really? But there can't be much left to be afraid of; if one has no superstitions.'

'There is still life to be afraid of.'

'With so little of it left?'

'But we do not feel life as duration. You well know that. A tragedy may be concentrated in a bare half-hour, as well at the end of life as at the beginning. One minute, if it is sufficiently terrible, may blot out half a century. What was the suffering on the cross? Three hours. Yet it has shadowed two millenniums.'

Graham lifted his eyes at that and looked across at Madame de Lamouderie. He looked long. His look plunged into the night of her eyes, plunged and sank and brooded there. What was it between him and this old woman? He distrusted her; he disliked her; it