"So much the better, for I don't mind confessing now that I was a wee bit afraid of his rough ways and stalwart bulk. His room is better than his company--a Jacobin!"
"No one who is good need be afraid of Jean," retorted Toinon, who, without another word, led the way across the courtyard.
The chill of presentiment touched Gabrielle like an icy wind as she passed in to the dreary hall, black now in shadowy twilight. The crumbling implements of torture on the walls took fantastic and forbidding shapes. The panoplies of helmets of the Moyen Age seemed to mope, and mow, and wink their eyeless sockets. Somehow, Lorge seemed more grimly forbidding than before, after the long absence; there was a pervading odour of dank decay which was as a breath from out the charnel-house. The chatelaine shuddered, and drawing her cloak closer took her foster-sister by the hand.
"What is it? Toinon, tell me," she whispered. "Has something dreadful happened?"
Toinon glanced round quickly with the same strange expression of doubt mingled with concern, and held her peace.
What could it be? Toinon appeared to consider that her mistress had done something wrong--or was it some act, whose unwisdom she would surely rue, which filled the eyes of the foster-sister with disapproval. In the look there was pained surprise as well as pity. The tightened lips were closed, imprisoning reproach.
Foreboding, she knew not what, the marquise mounted the grand staircase and opened the door of the long saloon, expecting to find the children there.
"Not here? Where are they?" began Gabrielle. Then her voice died away, the words frozen on her lips. The brothers had remained below, ostensibly to superintend the removal of the baggage from the coach. In the dim saloon with its view through the gaunt row of windows of the crocus-coloured Loire, stood Gabrielle aghast, and Toinon, with brows knit anxiously--and against the light at the further end a tall, upright figure like a sable shadow, that was only too familiar.
"She!" murmured the startled chatelaine, clasping her hands upon her breast. "Mademoiselle Aglaé Brunelle!"
"It was a trick, then," Toinon muttered, with a deepening frown. "She knew not of her coming!"