"I was not counting that cost," she said in a low voice. "O Armand, Armand, why will you not go away and leave me in peace!"
"Because, at last, you love me."
And she made no denial, but breaking from his hold, stood in the midst of the roses with her face in her hands.
"There is the nightingale," said Armand softly. "It sings for us. There are no nightingales in the forest, nor roses. But if you came to me there, Laurence, in the little hut, it would not lack either. O my world, my rose ... I have waited so long, so patiently! ... Has not death itself spared us for this...?"
Half an hour later he was groping his way across the hut. It was foolish to strike a light, so, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down in the dark on the settle. But his brain was on fire, and phantasmagoric figures danced before his eyes—Charette, and the little princess in her boy's clothes, and he heard himself saying, as he had said to Marie-Caroline, when he had kissed that royal, adventurous hand, "I would gladly die for you, Madame." But in the half-dream Madame had the face of Laurence de Vigerie.
He came back from it. The settle was confoundedly hard, as hard as a coffin. Then he remembered having seen, lying dead on a couch just like this, in a peasant's cottage at Le Chêne, before the engagement began, a young man shot by an Orleanist patrol. He had been sorry for him then; he was sorrier now, for perhaps the blood had once raced and pounded in his veins as now in his own, and he, too, had thought, perhaps, "To-morrow! to-morrow...."
(2)
That night, the last of her journey, the cloud of apprehension lifted from Horatia's mind, and sitting by her window in the inn at Ploermel, she had a clear conviction that Armand was alive, and had escaped from Vendée. She would not be too late. She would forgive him; she would even ask him to forgive her the hardness she had shown him. And—who knew—they might perhaps take up their life together again where it had been broken off, for she had experience now.
But who knows when the cup of experience is fully drained?
When Kerfontaine came in sight next morning she could hardly control herself. Would he have had any word of her approach; was he there at all? ...