(4)
Madame de Vigerie, being gifted with the seeing eye, found Horatia pathetic. "She is losing him, and she knows it," was her verdict now. In this she was perhaps attributing to the girl more clearness of vision than she had yet attained to, but the tragedy of the situation she had not overestimated.
On arrival at Kerfontaine, Horatia had tried hard to pretend that things were as they had been in January. But the very fact of the attempt had slain the chance of its success. It was idle to wander round the rose-garden, now in fullest leaf and soon to be ablaze; it had been warmer there under the early snow. Something had gone out of the spirit of the place, and not all the cajolery of May could bring back the thrill of the bare boughs. And yet it was not that she wanted her honeymoon over again. She had no yearnings for the romping happiness of the winter. Then she had been a girl; now she was a woman. Even in Paris she had realised that the time had come for her and Armand to pass on to another stage—together, and now in the shadow of motherhood she could understand much that had been dark to her before. Never again could their love fail to satisfy, for it had found its fulfilment.
Something of this she tried to hint to Armand one May evening in the garden. He only said, "You amuse me when you look so serious, Horatia. I don't understand what you are talking about. Those furs become you," (it was a chilly evening,) "you had better wear them always."
They were the words he had used in the winter, and she had thrilled then to hear them. Now they were like a sacrilege. O, why would he not understand! He must enter with her into this new world. She could not, would not know its joys, and perhaps its fears, alone.
She came one day into his sanctum, where he was doing something absorbing with a fowling-piece.
"Are you very busy, dear? Yes, I see you are. I will come another time."
She looked very animated and charming, so the young man laid down the gun and said with a smile. "Of course I will, mon amie. What is it that you want of me?"
"I want you," replied Horatia, mysteriously sparkling, "to come upstairs to the old armoury. I have something to ask you."
He followed her up the staircase, looking at the little curls on the back of her neck. She led him to the big, disused room on the first floor which still held the remains of what had been a fine collection of armour, until the tenantry of Armand's maternal grandfather had ransacked it for weapons during the Revolution, the better to defend him.