“Monsieur, let me come from the window! Oh, monsieur, let me, and I will light a blest candle!”
“A little longer—just a little longer. I foresee a darkness presently, and then, lest my Madonna be blotted from my sight, the candle shall burn.”
The girl looked out fearfully at the advancing van of the storm. It was still brilliant sunshine in the garden, but with an effect as if the outposts of noon were falling back upon their centre, already half-demoralised in prospect of an overwhelming charge. The wind, too, beginning to move like that that precedes an avalanche, was scouting through the shrubberies with a distant noise of innumerable tramping feet; and the fitful moaning of the horn rose to a prolonged scream, that drew upon the heart with a point of indescribable anguish.
“Why, however,” said Ned, “have you no apprehension that I shall tell tales to M. de St Denys?”
“I said I had no fear, monsieur.”
“Would he not resent this so unflattering opinion of his satellites?”
“What is his own of them, does monsieur think?—that a tipsy boor assists the cause of freedom? Monsieur, my master is not blind, save perhaps in thinking others so. Saint Sacrement! the sun has gone out! It was as if a wave of cloud extinguished it.”
“Never mind that. In thinking others blind to what, girl?”
“I must not say—indeed, I must not say.”
“Is this to be a saint—to damn with innuendo? Fie, then, Nicette!”