She was struck with these proud shadows etched on the conflagration of the sky, but instead of walking the more slowly to take in the spectacle, she cleared the old familiar porch at one bound.
“Has Mr. Maurice come in yet?” she asked at the very door.
“No, miss, not yet,” explained the maid. “Mr. Roquevillard is waiting for you.”
Her father had heard her, and was already opening the door of his study to let her in.
“Well, Margaret?”
“Father, I couldn’t find him.”
They said little, but, nevertheless, both father and daughter felt all the secret suspense and anguish of some menaced evil—an evil greater than those which youth is usually guilty of, they felt, for they had a foreboding fear of the strength of Mrs. Frasne.
III
THE CALVARY OF LEMENC
ON leaving his father’s house Maurice Roquevillard crossed to the other side of the town and made his way straight up to the Calvary of Lemenc, the place where Mrs. Frasne had appointed that they should meet.
The choice of this place in itself was a defiance of public opinion. It was a hill that dominated all Chambéry and was visible from all sides. In the old days it had been only a bare rock, of such considerable strategic importance that in the times of the old dukes there had been a beacon there, answering the signals of Lepine and Guet, those forward-thrusting summits that stand like redoubtable sentinels on the frontiers of France. You reach it nowadays by a path which rises upward from the Reclus district, above the railways, and follows on one side the high walls of a convent, and on the other a series of miserable one-story dwellings. At the end of this defile you come out into the country, and find yourself opposite a little hill, crowned no longer now with works of war, but with a chapel that stands out against the dear and distant background of the Revard hills and Nivolet. From there on the path is quite open. A thin border of acacias gives it scant protection. Cut into the very rock, it crowds out the meagre grass. Some unfinished stations of the cross, with empty niches, occur at intervals on the way up. It is an abandoned promenade, where even if you are visible from a distance you do not ever meet a soul.