Avoye raised her eyes and looked at him. "No," she said. "It seemed the only, the right thing to do."
"One does those things instinctively, you see, with those one cares for," the sagacious young man pointed out to her.
She pondered this, her eyes downcast. Never could the mentor beside her have imagined himself admitted into so much intimacy. Heaven send he had made good use of it! He sat quite motionless, for it was a thousand times better to miss the diligence altogether than to cut short this wonderful chance she had given him. Aymar could not have explained fully to her yesterday, or else she had been in no state to comprehend the explanation.
As he revolved this conclusion Avoye herself said suddenly, "But I am forgetting; you will miss the coach if I keep you longer." She rose, growing less the child. "I can never thank you properly, Monsieur de Courtomer, for what you have done. At least now I understand." Her lip suddenly trembled. "I have really heard everything now, have I not?"
"Everything that matters," replied Laurent after a second's hesitation. The ramrod story had so thin a connection with her, and it would horrify her so—and his last night's desire to do this was now as dead as last night's dreams. "No," he exclaimed abruptly, "there is one fact more I should like you to know. Your cousin has done many brave things in his career, but you have never heard the bravest. And it was done for you."
Therewith he sat down again and told her the story of the interview with Colonel Richard.
(12)
There did not seem to be any place remote enough to shelter her grief and her remorse. Not the house, where Grand'mère might at any time find or summon her; not the rose-garden, where she, the faithless lover, had just said farewell to the faithful friend; not the orchard, where she had once been comforted . . . with lies, as she had said to Aymar yesterday. They were lies . . . but he was not a liar. Yet she had told him that he was—told him that he had sold his honour, flung his justification back in his face. At the one moment in their lives when her trust in him should have stood firm it had snapped like rotten thread. After all that he had suffered for her sake it had remained for her, who loved him, to give him the last, the intolerable, enduring wound—the lover who, as she had just learnt, had not spared to crucify for her his pride and his most intimate feelings, and make an appeal to his victorious enemy for silence. And this Colonel Richard, a stranger, a foe, who knew everything, had taken his hand—whereas she . . .
The Aven, by which at last she sat dry-eyed, with a pain in her breast as though it were her own heart, and not Aymar's, which she had stabbed, rippled contentedly through the pastures . . . on its way to Pont-aux-Rochers. Yes, and despite the strain, the unfulfilment, it seemed to her now that these past years at Sessignes had been like this placid and contented stream, compared with the torment into which one hour had hurried her life. Oh, if only she had been able to keep the pale sunshine of those days, even though it should never have been transmuted into a brighter radiance! They would never come again—never, never.
The Aven smiled assent; a wagtail walked alertly at the brink, and the martins swooped above it. But it was going to Pont-aux-Rochers . . .