"And you are not tired?"
"No, I am not tired," he said curtly.
All the while that he had tramped with his burden through the woods and across the fields, he had felt contented with only the squirrels and the birds around him to mock him for his heavy gait, his stained blouse and muddy boots. The sight of the first cottage of Courson suddenly took all the zest out of his spirit. Self-consciousness returned, and with it his full measure of wrath against his kinsfolk, whom of a truth he had no mind to meet again—not while his fatigue, of which he suddenly became conscious, and the additional mudstains on his clothes after the long tramp, placed him at such obvious disadvantage. Their presence, he felt, would jar upon his mood to a degree which he felt he could not endure.
Fernande, who had been silently watching him from behind the bunch of bluebells, saw the scowl which gradually gathered on his brow and chased away that strange rapt look and the sunny smile, which she had noted with such satisfaction every time that she contrived to catch a glimpse of his face. Her womanly instinct had been so unerring up to now, the success of her undertaking so assured, that she had no mind to mar it by a false move in the end.
"Mon cousin," she said suddenly, just as de Maurel, avoiding the main village street, had struck through an orchard and along a by-path, which led to a postern gate in the boundary wall of the château, "mon cousin, by your leave, an you'll take me as far as the Lodge, I could try and walk up the avenue to the château—alone."
"But there's no one at the Lodge," he said, "and the avenue is over long."
"Annette will be at the Lodge," she argued; "she goes thither every morning to air the rooms. The door will be open. I could slip in.... No one would see us...."
Now that she suggested just what he would have liked to do, he was ready with opposition.