"Yes."
"And he telegraphs to Chelda as big as a lord," continued Miss Gastonguay. "Will call on you Thursday, at 3 P. M.,'—a peremptory butler that."
"Perhaps he is hard up," suggested Captain White.
To his regret the conversation was here broken off, for Derrice exclaimed, suddenly, "Can't we go through the graveyard?"
The old French cemetery, with its graves clustering around the hill on which gleamed the marble cross, was a little to their left, but Miss Gastonguay willingly made the détour. Justin did not go in. He stood silently by the gate, his gaze wandering after his wife. Dear little feet slipping so reverently between the grassy mounds. How far was their owner from suspecting her relationship to the weary sleepers below!
Lingeringly she went from one marble slab to another, touching with gentle fingers the flowers laid upon them, or pausing to read the inscriptions carved to the memory of Gastonguays, De Lisles or De Saint Castins.
The small cemetery was exquisitely kept. Miss Gastonguay possessed an almost Chinese reverence for the last resting-places of her ancestors, and one of her favourite occupations was to pace slowly to and fro in the green enclosure that had almost fallen into oblivion when she began her reign at French Cross.
Justin saw that her piercing glance was bent approvingly on his wife, and that her eyes filled with tears when Derrice knelt beside the tiniest grave of all,—that of a little child Gastonguay,—and tenderly laid on it a rose that she took from her breast. There was a lamb on the grave, a sculptured lamb of white Maine granite, and above towered a colossal figure in flesh-red stone of the founder of the house,—stout-hearted Louis Gastonguay, who stood as in life, his back to the sea, his trusty musket in his right hand, his left pointing urgently toward the interior of the vast country whose exploration was the chief topic of conversation in his day.
Derrice and the lamb, and old Louis and his musket, stood in fine contrast. Chelda, looking on and suppressing her disdain, could not, however, conceal from Justin her conviction that his wife's attitude was one chosen for subtle effect rather than one of unstudied simplicity. He smiled slightly, called Derrice, and the picnic party took up its way to the wood, while Chelda returned to the house.
She was not lonely, although she had never in her life been as much cut off from society as she was this summer. She despised Rossignol, she disliked the people in it. Only one person had made the place endurable to her, and that person had been driven from her. She had now but one desire,—to accomplish her vengeance, to see Derrice unhappy, one-tenth as unhappy as she was,—and then to take her aunt to some place nearer the man without whom her life was unendurable.