“She has a better grace than I, perhaps, to care for herself. I mean only she will lead you whither you desire.”
“To the chateau?”
“She keeps the lodge at its gates.”
She frowned, nodded her head, and went off with a little mocking song on her lips, turning down a side track that led to farm buildings. She was a lithe voluptuous animal, breathing a lavish generosity of life. Ned watched her in a sort of rigor of admiration as she retreated. A high stone wall, pierced at regular intervals with loopholes, enclosed the steading she made for. Above the coping showed the roofs of the house, and of numerous substantial barns that backed upon the wall; and, at a point in the latter, frowned a huge studded gateway, strong enough to withstand the shock of anything less than artillery.
By this gate the girl paused a moment, looked back, and seeing the stranger still observant of her, whisked about resentfully enough to bring down upon her head a sleet of acacia petals from a bush that stood hard by. Then she vanished, and Ned turned him to his pursuit of the other.
She had already reached the farther end of the Place, and he followed rapidly, lest she should disappear from his ken. But he came up with her as she was leaving the village by a road that mounted on a slight gradient amongst trees. At the wrought-iron gates of the chateau, set but a few hundred yards farther in a thicket of evergreens, he addressed her, as she was shifting from her head the great burden it had borne.
“That is much for a girl, Nicette. I will help you with it.”
She looked at him, he could see, with some abashed recognition. Her lips, that were a little parted in breathlessness, trembled perceptibly. Without a protest she let him receive and drop upon the road the truss of clover. Some strands of the bundle that were yet entangled in the disorder of her rabbit-brown hair gave her an unlicensed strangeness of aspect; but for the rest it was the Madonna of the old church of Liége—the colourless, pure dévote with the Greek profile and round blue eyes small-pupiled.
“Nicette,” said the young man, who, if cold, had an admirable assurance, “to pass from Théroigne to you is to go to sleep in the sun and wake to the twilight.”
She gave a little gasp.