And the fact that she was in the home of her one-time lover gave rise to other complex fancies. How would they meet if chance should send him there during her stay? He had had time for many more such boyish fancies since those days, and back of them all was the home sweetheart she heard spoken of so often––Gertrude Loring.
How very, very long ago it seemed since the meetings at Fontainbleau; what an impulsive fool she had been, and how childish it all seemed now!
But Judithe de Caron told herself she was not the sort of person to allow memories of bygone sentiment to interfere for long with practical affairs. She drew up a chair to the little stand by the window and plunged into the work she had spoken of, and for an hour her pen moved rapidly over the paper until page after page was laid aside.
But after the last bit of memoranda was completed she leaned back, looking out into the blue mists of the night––across his lands luxuriant in all the beauty of summer time and moonlight, the fields over which he had ridden, the trees under which he had walked, with, perhaps, an occasional angry thought of her––never dreaming that she, also, would walk there some day.
“But to think that I am actually here––here above all!” she murmured softly. “Maman, once I said I would be Judithe indeed to that man if he was ever delivered into my hands. Yet, when he came I ran away from him––ran away because I was afraid of him! But now––”
Her beautiful eyes half closed in a smile not mirthful, and the sentence was left unfinished.
CHAPTER XVIII.
What embraces, ejaculations and caresses, when Evilena, accompanied by Pluto and the delighted Raquel, arrived at the Terrace next morning! Judithe, who saw from the veranda the rapturous meeting of mother and daughter, sighed, a quick, impatient catching of the breath, and turned to enter the library through the open French windows. Reconsidering her intention, she halted, and waited at the head of the broad steps where Kenneth’s sister saw her for the first time and came to her with a pleased, half shy greeting, and where Kenneth’s mother slipped one arm around each as they entered the house, and between the two she felt welcomed into the very heart of the McVeigh family feminine.