Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/280



ILL was walking up through the wet woods above the Manoir. It was still early and the air fresh with rain which had fallen heavily all night. The clouds had rolled away at dawn, leaving a vast immaculate sky. And now the sun streamed forth over the drenched and dripping world with almost summer sultriness.

Two days had passed since the evening when Marthe had come; two days and three nights; but Jill had not seen her again. She had spent the hours of daylight out of doors; but she had not gone to the Manoir. Every morning she got into the car and drove far, far away, seeing new country and all the glory. On the first day it had been inland she had sped, up and over the tablelands, through the great birch woods where sheets of wood anemones grew in the dappled shade of swaying catkins; and yesterday she had followed, high up, the course of the swollen, passionate river and found a ruined castle standing at the bottom of a ravine with torrents wildly wreathing at its foot. She had spent the afternoon there in a strange solitude. An eagle had floated over her as she lay on the grassy ledges of masonry. She had watched a pair of tits building their nest in a hole near by and a flock of tiny mountain sheep, wandering down the valley, looked up at her with little mush-