“What are you thinking about?” said Livette, who had had her eyes upon him for a moment past, as if she could see his face distinctly, although they were sitting in the shadow. Beyond question, she felt that his thoughts were elsewhere. There is nothing more subtle than a lover’s divination.
“I am thinking,” said Renaud, a long minute after the question, “about my horse, which I propose to take back from Rampal to-morrow if he can be found in Camargue or Crau.”
“And then?”
“And then?” he repeated—“I was thinking of the Conscript’s Hut, where he is at this moment, perhaps,—in hiding.”
“And of what else?” Livette insisted.
“Oh! how do I know! of the fever—of all we have just been saying——”
“Alas!” said the maiden, “and not at all of me, Renaud? do you not think of me any more?”
Her voice was sad.
He shuddered, and the movement did not escape the little one’s notice. It seemed to him, as Livette uttered that reproach, that he saw the gipsy again as he had seen her in the afternoon, standing before him, near at hand, all naked and so brown! as if she were accustomed to pass her days naked in the sun, and were tanned from head to foot by his rays. And how lithe and sinewy the wild creature was! A genuine animal, a little Arabian mare, of much finer breed than the Camargue stock. Alas! for too long a time, through fidelity to his fiancée, he had been as virtuous as a girl, and now the hot-blooded fellow’s continence was taking its revenge upon him, a cruel revenge, arousing mad, amorous longings that were not for Livette. And so his very respect for her—poor child!—turned against her!
“Jacques?” said Livette, in the hardly audible tone the sentiment of love imparts to the lover’s voice, a soft, veiled tone, heard by the heart rather than by the ear.