Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/304

 They turned and walked down the central path towards the house. Old Médor, casting a reproachful glance at his mistress, got upon his feet and limped at their heels. At the open door, where he had remained standing, Joseph discreetly withdrew, and there, at her upper window, sitting in full view, was Madame de Lamouderie, and her ancient face, marked like the moon's with cavernous shadows, looked like a skull set up to stare at them. Let her stare. Something dark and dangerous in Graham's nature rejoiced in the sinister fairy-tale background of his love. Here he walked in the sunlight with his heavenly Eurydice and all Hades might yawn before them, all its furies shriek, for any faltering they could bring to his exultant heart.

'So there's an end to all disguises,' he repeated; and they paused at the end of the path, invisible now to the watcher above. They are gone. There's nothing between us.'

He was looking straight into those wonderful longsought eyes; eyes of wide, windswept, lonely dawn, with its slender moon, its morning star. Never on earth had there been eyes like Marthe Ludérac's, and to believe them attainable was as if in the fairy-tale one stretched forth one's hand and found that one could touch the silver moon. 'So why keep up defences?' he said, and he almost smiled at her. There had been no tenderness between them. His smile was hardly tender now. It possessed rather than caressed her.

'We keep them up for Jill,' said Marthe Ludérac.