As he turned round to close the window after him, his immovable face, pale and wrinkled in the glaring sunshine, looked in upon them with weary, half-closed eyes. Behind that mask a consuming rage of jealousy leapt up, and fought to find expression.
CHAPTER XVIII
Jocelyn remained standing where she was. Half-an-hour ago she would have run to Giles and flung herself into his arms, now she stood and looked at him, her hands clasped in front of her, waiting for the cloud of that terrible thought to pass by and let a gleam of daylight through.
“Dear, what is it, are you ill?”
Neither his voice, low and tender, nor the look of love in his eyes, nor the warm clasp of his hand upon her icy-cold fingers, were of any avail.
She drew her hands away from him and passed them over her brow, as if to sweep aside her thoughts.
“Let us go out—I want air. I can’t breathe in here, come!” The words were wild, but she was surprised at the even tones of her own voice. She had thought, if she once opened her lips, she must scream. She took her hat from the table and put it on, even glancing in the glass to set it straight. Her face seemed to her very much the same as usual—that was curious!
She led the way from the room, and into the hotel garden. Legard followed, bewildered and heavy at heart. Jocelyn walked swiftly, taking a little, stony path which ran winding upwards from the garden. Walls hemmed it in, and it was rutted where the water coursed down it in the heavy rains. It led to terraces of olive and almond trees sloping up the hill. She stopped in the shade of an old tree; she felt giddy and faint, and was glad to sit down. Giles threw himself beside her, waiting for her to speak. The brown lizards chased each other among the stones. Bees, hovering over the wild thyme, drummed softly with their wings; a cicala churred harshly from a branch above, and from far away came the faint, shrill strains of a goatherd’s pipe. A thin, brown haze of heat hung over the white buildings of the town below, and the sunlight threw delicate shadows from the trees on to the stone-strewn banks of rough grass.
Presently Jocelyn raised her arm and rested it against the mossy stem of the olive tree. She looked dazed, like one who had received a heavy blow, and she kept glancing from side to side, as if trying to find the way out of some unfamiliar place.
“When did Irma die?” she said suddenly.