Across the silence of sheer fatigue their eyes met—Jean’s filled with a wistful solicitude as unconscious and candid as a child’s, the man’s curiously brilliant and inscrutable—and in a moment the silence had become something other, different, charged with emotional significance, the revealing silence which falls suddenly between a man and woman.
At last:
“This is what comes of stealing a day from Mrs. Grundy,” commented the man drily.
And the tension was broken.
He sprang up, as though, anxious to maintain the recovered atmosphere of the commonplace.
“Come! Having shot her bolt and tried ineffectually to down you in a ditch, I expect the old lady will let us get home safely now. We’re through the worst. There are no more drifts between here and the hotel.”
It was true. Anything that might have spelt danger was past, and it only remained to follow the beaten track up to the hotel, though even so, with the wind and snow driving in their faces, it took them a good half-hour to accomplish the task.
Monsieur and Madame de Varigny, a distracted maître d’hôtel, and a little crowd of interested and sympathetic visitors welcomed their arrival.
“Mon dieu, mademoiselle! But we rejoice to see you back!” exclaimed Madame de Varigny. “We ourselves are only newly returned—and that, with difficulty, through this terrible storm—and we arrive to find that none knows where you are!”
“Me, I made sure that mademoiselle had accompanied Madame la Comtesse.” asseverated Monsieur Vautrinot, nervously anxious to exculpate himself from any charge of carelessness.