“Lucette, you will make me lose patience. Would you have me deign to fret myself over the worrying of an idle gossip-monger?”
“Oh, it is terrible.”
“You are not yourself, child, and are frightened because you have angered Denys more deeply than usual. Come, let us go out into the bright sunshine and shake off these fretting fancies. You are always the slave of passing moods, Lucette,” she said, as they crossed the terrace and passed down the broad steps into the garden. “But out here in the sunshine you can most easily recover your spirits.”
“I am plagued with a fear of—I know not what,” answered Lucette, sighing dismally. “I wonder where Denys has gone.”
“He will come back, and as you are always telling me, all will come right, again.” She smiled but the smile ended in something like a sigh.
She was indeed sorely perplexed by the course matters were taking, and although she would not acknowledge it, Lucette’s recital of Dauban’s warning had moved her considerably.
It fitted closely with her own feelings in regard to giving herself to a man she had never seen. Her pride of place and family had alone induced her to think of accepting the husband whom her mother had chosen for her; but it was not in human nature to acquiesce without murmurs and qualms and doubts and hesitation.
Moreover, the scene in the market place on the previous day had disturbed her profoundly, despite her stout assertion that the night’s reflection had restored her. Her couch had been the ground of a fierce battle between certain wild new-springing emotions and the set and sober thoughts of duty; and the fight had raged through the whole of a sleepless night.
In vain she had told herself over and over again that the stranger cavalier was nothing to her and could be nothing; that it was treachery to her dead mother even to let a thought of him force itself upon her; that it was unworthy, unmaidenly, and cowardly to be moved by the remembrance that a man had looked kindly into her eyes and that she had faltered before his glance; and this at the very moment when he to whom she was betrothed was coming to her.
She upbraided herself bitterly for her weakness, and rising from her couch had passed an hour or more on her knees in fervent prayer for strength to overcome the temptation which she found so alluring, and for power to subdue these new feelings as subtly sweet as they were strange and exciting.