As they did not exchange a word, their embarrassment increased.
Hastily, to escape the constraint each imposed upon the other, she ran to the door at the right and entered. And he, well pleased to be able to do or say something to bring them nearer together, called out:
“Wait for the light, Livette! I am coming.”
But Livette had suddenly remembered the gipsy’s threat. “It is fate,” she said to herself, “I see it now!” And she felt herself grow pale.
Then she had an inspiration.
“Follow me, Renaud.”
They passed through rooms where furniture of the time of the Empire was sleeping beneath its covers, and the long hangings falling from the ceiling in broad, stiff folds, and withered, as it were, by time; rooms seldom visited by the master, but kept in order by Livette and her grandmother.
At last, Renaud and Livette reached an apartment with bare, whitewashed walls, once used as a chapel.
A wooden altar, entirely devoid of fittings and ornament, stood at one end of the room. Before the white and gold door of the tabernacle the sacred stone was missing, leaving a square hole in the wood-work of the altar.
But Livette opened a broad door flush with the wall. It opened into a closet in the wall. When the door was thrown wide open, they could see, below a shelf about level with their heads, chasubles and stoles hanging straight and stiff—with great crosses in heavy gold embroidery—suns from which the dove came forth; and mystic triangles, and Agnus Deis. Among all the others were vestments for use in mourning ceremonies,—black, with bones and executioners’ ladders, hammers and nails, in heavy white embroidery; and—to Livette’s amazement—there, in the centre of a stole, on silk as black as night, was worked a crown of thorns in silver, which, in the lamplight, seemed to emit bright rays.