"I am sure that would be a blunder!" said I bitterly.
"Ha! Does it not seem so, to my Damoiselle and her servant? But the good God knows. If my Damoiselle would only trust Him!"
"'Trust'!" cried I, thinking of Sybil. "Ah, Margot, I have had enough of trusting. I feel as if I could never trust man again—nor woman."
"Only one Man," said Marguerite softly. "And He died for us."
After saying that, she went away and left me. I lay still, her last words making a kind of refrain in my head, mingling with the one thought that seemed to fill every corner.
"He died for us!" Surely, then, He cannot hate us. He is not trying to give us as much suffering as we can bear?
I rose at last, and went to seek Guy. But I had to search the house almost through for him. I found him at length, in the base court, gazing through one of the narrow windows through which the archers shoot. The moment I saw his face, I perceived that though we might be one in sorrow we were emphatically two in our respective ways of bearing it. The quiet, patient grief in that faraway look which I saw in his eyes, was dictated by a very different spirit from that which actuated me. And he found it, too.
Not a word would he hear against Sybil. He nearly maddened me by calmly assuming that her sufferings were beyond ours, and entreating me not to let any words of mine add to her burden. It was so like Guy—always himself last! And when I said passionately that God was cruel, cruel!—he hushed me with the only flash of the old impetuosity that I saw in him.
"No, Elaine, no! Let me never hear that again."
I was silent, but the raging of the sea went on within.