He mastered himself by a wrenching effort. He stood aside, peremptorily motioning her to pass on her way. Not a word would he speak. She went forward a few steps—a numb, haggard spectre of beauty, a soul paralysed under the immediate terror of its sentence. Suddenly she turned upon him, awful in the last expression of despair.
“They will tear me to pieces when they know!”
“Let your Virgin protect you,” he said.
Without another word she left him, going off amongst the trees. The sunbeams, peering through the leaves, touched and fled from contact with her; woodland things scurried from her path; the cleansing rain, even, stringing the branches, withheld itself from falling till she had gone. Something that he drove under forcibly struggled to rise and give voice from the watcher’s heart. She looked so small, so pitifully frail and small a vessel to carry that great load of sin. The next moment she disappeared from his sight.
He turned, with a groan, to scrutinise the horror. It was yet so far undecayed as that he was able, for all his little memory of the living child, to identify the poor remains. But, for a certain reason, he would compel himself to a nauseous task—even to touch the thing if necessary. It was not. There was actual evidence, to his unaccustomed eyes, that the boy’s neck had been dislocated by the fall.
He moved away, giving out a sigh of fearful relief. At least he would not be haunted by that anguish. And should he follow and tell her?
“No,” he thought sternly—for love makes men cruel; “as she meant, so shall she suffer the worst.”
CHAPTER VIII.
The Viscount Murk received very gravely M. Becelaer de Lawoestine’s assurance that Monseigneur the Duke of Orleans was at the moment, and had been for months past, in Paris.
“Enfin,” said this gentleman, “if report is to be believed, it is the most timely place for him. At least he will not put himself at the head of the emigrants,” he added, with a husky little laugh.