From embrasure to embrasure she ran, to follow him with her eyes; and in a few seconds he rode out into the square in front of the church, at the foot of the Calvary erected there.
She leaned over and watched him. Where was he going? He had stopped.
Now he had no choice but to turn back. He preferred not to see Livette at once! He preferred to return to the free air of the desert, to set his thoughts in order, discover his real feelings, reckon up his chances, and, after that was done, to be left alone with the image of the gitana, from whom he parted willingly, however, for he was very glad to be at a distance from her, with unrestrained freedom of movement, the better to think of her.
Before leaving the roof of the church, Livette cast a glance upon the broad expanse of Camargue at her feet. Ah! how empty was that immense space! The few scattered houses which would have delighted her eyes in the plain, were hidden by the clumps of umbrella-like pines beneath which they stood. Nothing human replied to the cry of distress uttered by her poor heart, which longed to follow the bewitched drover into the desert, and which seemed to her to flutter down from the summit of the tower to the ground, where it was crushed by the fall like a bird fallen from its nest.
XVII
THE OLD WOMAN
Renaud rode at a foot-pace to the Ménage, one of the farms belonging to the Château d’Avignon. He had ordered Bernard to bring Blanchet to him there, intending to take him back to the château. It was but a short distance from one to the other.
He was exceedingly astonished to find that the more he reflected upon what had happened to him—and it was really what he had hoped for—the more dissatisfied he was.
He believed that he had finally formed, in spite of everything, a fairly accurate estimate of the gipsy’s character—a fact that pleased him. He had simply said to himself that she was an uncivilized creature, since she could forget all shame of her nakedness in her haste to punish as best she could a man she deemed overbold. From her very immodesty, from the arrogance and malignity she had exhibited at their first meeting, he had, strangely enough, evolved a proof of chastity so sure of itself, so disdainful of peril, that the shameless creature seemed to him only the more desirable.