Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/312



'M like the Wandering Jew,' thought Jill as, on the afternoon of that blazing day, she raced her car through the spring landscape. Jill could never, in the most tragic moments, address herself in tragic terms, and it steadied her nerves now to see herself in this comic, if dolorous, aspect of a creature who must keep in movement from dawn to dusk. For Dick might return at any moment to the Ecu d'Or and she could not see him yet. He must rest, and she must rest; a night must pass over them before they could speak to one another. She, too, had hardly slept, and until night she would keep away from him. Ah, if only she and Dick could, both of them, go to sleep for days and days and wake to find everything understood between them without one word. Her very flesh shrank from the searing thought of what they might have to say to one another.

So she drove. She took the valley road up towards the gorges and climbed the mountain to the great tablelands, there to make the widest circle of all her adventurings, through the birch forests, down into gently wooded valleys, where apple-blossom was breaking into bud, up to the plain once more and past a chain of lakes that glittered in the sunlight under the sultry sky like polished steel. Everything was splendid, but