Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/287

 'Do you forgive me?' Jill whispered, clinging to her hand, and it seemed to her that with the question she had cut Marthe still more deeply, for her voice was quick and short as she answered: 'There is nothing to forgive.' She held Jill from her and turned her head away and fixed her eyes upon the ground, and Jill heard that she was breathing quickly. 'There is nothing to forgive,' she repeated. And they sat thus, for a moment, in silence.

'Let me tell you then,' said Marthe. 'I did not know that echoes of that old story had reached Buissac. Yet it is natural that it should be known. It is natural that it should be believed—of me. It was at Bordeaux, after my mother's death, during the last winter of the war, that I took a soldier into my room for the night.'

'Was he ill? Unhappy? Had he nowhere else to go?' Jill asked, timidly, for Marthe had paused and in her voice was a world of haughty solitude.

Marthe Ludérac glanced at her for a moment. 'You guess the truth, at once; the truth that no one else would care to believe. He was very unhappy and he had nowhere else to go. He was a little permissionnaire and he came on that cold, wet night into the restaurant where I ate. A cheap, poor place; it was my first winter in Bordeaux and I had difficulty in living. All the tables were full, so I beckoned him to come to mine. He came so timidly, like a gentle, frightened dog. I saw how unhappy he was. He had a young, good face, thoughtful, sensitive—with grey