“Good!” he said, after a moment's hesitation. “I wash my hands of you. You refuse to go?”
“Yes,” answered Denise, going towards the door with a high head, and, it is possible, an aching heart. For the two often go together.
And the abbé, a man little given to the concealment of his feelings, shook his fist at the leather curtain as it fell into place behind her.
“Ah—these women!” he said aloud. “A secret that is thirty years old!”
Denise hurried down the steps and away from the village. She knew that the postman, having passed through Olmeta, must now be on the high-road on his way to Perucca, and she felt sure that he must have in his bag the letter of which she had followed, in imagination, the progress during the last three days.
“Now it is in the train from Paris to Marseilles; now it is on board the Persévérance, steaming across the Gulf of Lyons,” had been her thought night and morning. “Now it is at Bastia,” she had imagined on waking at dawn that day. And at length she had it now, in thought, close to her on the Olmeta road in front of her.
At a turn of the road she caught sight of the postman, trudging along beneath the heavy chestnut trees. Then at length she overtook him, and he stopped to open the bag slung across his shoulder. He was a silent man, who saluted her awkwardly, and handed her several letters and a newspaper. With another salutation he walked on, leaving Denise standing by the low wall of the road alone. There was only one letter for her. She turned it over and examined the seal: a bare sword with a gay French motto beneath it—the device of the Vasselots.
She opened the envelope after a long pause. It contained nothing but her own travel-stained letter, of which the seal had not been broken. And, as she thoughtfully examined both envelopes, there glistened in her eyes that light which it is vouchsafed to a few men to see, and which is the nearest approach to the light of heaven that ever illumines this poor earth. For love has, among others, this peculiarity: that it may live in the same heart with a great anger, and seems to gain only strength from the proximity.
Denise replaced the two letters in her pocket and walked on. A carriage passed her, and she received a curt bow and salutation from the Abbé Susini who was in it. The carriage turned to the right at the crossroads, and rattled down the hill in the direction of Vasselot. Denise's head went an inch higher at the sight of it.
“I met the Abbé Susini at Olmeta,” she said to Mademoiselle Brun, a few minutes later in the great bare drawing-room of the Casa Perucca. “And he transmitted the Count de Vasselot's command that we should leave the Casa Perucca to-night for France. I suggested that the order should be given to the Château de Vasselot instead of the Casa Perucca, and the abbé took me at my word. He has gone to the Château de Vasselot now in a carriage.”