"Monsieur, you heard nothing of Lord Starling?"
I touched her hand lightly. "Nothing, madame. I have no news."
"Then matters stand just as they did a week ago?"
I hesitated. "As concerns Lord Starling, yes. As concerns ourselves—— Madame, I carry a lighter heart than I did. All this week I have feared that you were fretting at the loneliness and the rough surroundings. But I find you serene and the surface of life smooth. It is a gallant spirit that you bring to this situation. I thank you, madame."
She did not speak for a moment, so that I wondered if I had vexed her. I looked up straight into her great eyes that were full on me, and there was something disquietingly alight in her glance, a flicker of that lightning that had played between us on the day of the storm.
"Monsieur!" she cried, with a little sobbing laugh. "I beg you never to thank me—for anything. The stream of gratitude must always run from me to you. I have not been serene because of any will of mine. It has been instinctive. I can sometimes carry out a fixed purpose, but I do it stiffly, inflexibly, not as you do, with a laugh and a shrug, monsieur. No, no! My serenity has not been calculated. I have been—I have been almost happy. It is strange, but it is true."
I drew my hand away from her finger tips, for my own were shaking.
"Madame, what makes you happy?"
She looked down at me with frank seriousness, but her eyes still kept their sweet, strange brightness; she pressed her palms together as she always did when much in earnest.
"Monsieur, is it so strange after all? Think of the wonder of what I see about me! The great stars, the dawns, and the strange waters that go no one knows where. I have lived all my life in courts and have not felt trammeled by them, but now—— Monsieur, there is a freedom, yes, and a happiness stirring in me that I have not known. I wonder if you understand?"
I watched the starlight draw elfin lines across her face, and my heart suddenly cried through my tongue words that my brain would have forbidden.