All night her heart went dancing; it danced on to the joy of the morning, and awoke as if to a sense of wild reprieve. She kept her secret to herself—the secret of her knowledge of his return—but its fumes were in her brain, and she could not altogether hide the exhilaration they caused there. Fanchette, attending to her Highness’s toilette, was in a curiously silent mood—morose even, and uncommunicative. Her mistress sought, by every merry art, to coax the girl into a response to her own bright spirits. She laughed at and rallied her, she overflowed with kindness, she would not be denied for all the icy rebuffs she encountered. But without much avail, it seemed. In truth the camériste, perplexed and a little conscience-haunted, was in the last temper for welcoming such approaches. She could have wished rather for affront, impatience, inconsiderateness—anything that would have appeared to justify her in offence, to provoke her to retaliation. But this unassailable sweetness was so disarming that for the moment it confounded her.
In the afternoon she accompanied her mistress to Colorno; and, there in the carriage, urgency at last lent her desperation. She stiffened herself, and spoke:
“You are glad to be returning, mademoiselle?”
“O, how glad, Fanchette!”
To Colorno, with its unutterable memories; to paradise regained; to the gardens where the wild love-flower grew, which his lips, and hers, had kissed! That she was bidden on her way thither seemed like a tacit surrender by authority to the inevitable. It must have known what associations that restoration would awake.
All the journey hitherto she had lain back in a blissful trance, listening to the ponderous rolling of the wheels as they gathered up the reluctant miles, incessantly framing in her mind a picture of the reunion that was to be, with its joys, its tender reproaches, its loving reassurances. The past was to be resumed, as if no black winter of separation had ever interposed. And spring was coming—spring with its wakening birds, and the blossoms breaking in its orange-groves. Smiling, she looked at the faithful little basil-pot by her side, and secretly caressed its leaves, now long recovered from the neglect to which she had once in her cruelty committed them. She would have bent and kissed them but for Fanchette.
The maid, setting her lips resolutely, did not answer for awhile.
“Then, I am not,” she said suddenly.
Isabella glanced at her, a little surprised.
“You do not like the country, Fanchette?”