"Yes."
I told him an outline of things and how grandmamma and I had lived at the cottage, and of all her wise sayings, and about the Marquis and Roy and Hephzibah, and the simple things of my long-ago past. It seemed as if I was speaking of some other person, so changed has all my outlook on life and things become since I went to Paris with Augustus.
"And now we come to the day we met in the lane," he said. "You were not even engaged then, were you?"
"Oh no! Grandmamma had never had a fainting-fit; she would have found the idea too dreadful at that time." I stopped suddenly, realizing what I had said. I could not tell him how and why I had married Augustus; he must think what he pleased.
He evidently thought a good deal, by the look in his eyes. I wish—I wish when he looks it did not make my heart beat so; it is foolish and uncomfortable.
"What a fool I was not to come with the automobile the night before your wedding and carry you off to Gretna Green," he said, in a voice that might have been mocking or serious, I could not tell which.
"Tell me, Comtesse, if I had tapped at your window, would you have looked out and come with me?"
"There was a bad thunder-storm, if I recollect. We should have got wet," I laughed, in a hollow way. He could not know how he was hurting me; he should not see, at all events.
"You would have been very dear to take to Gretna Green," he continued. "I should have loved to watch your wise, sweet eyes changing all expressions as morning dawned and you found yourself away from them all—away from Augustus."
I did not answer. I drew hieroglyphics with the point of the mauve parasol in the soft moss beneath our feet.