She had turned whiter than the lilies at her breast. This was because she was still very young and not quite as wise as some maidens.
For the same reason she left her warm bed that night to creep through the garden and slip into the stable and lay her tear-stained cheeks on the neck of Jack's horse.
CHAPTER XII
FROM THE FRONTIER
During the next three days, for the first time since he had known her, he did not go to see Lorraine. How he stood it—how he ever dragged through those miserable hours—he himself never could understand.
The wide sculptured eyes of Our Lady of Morteyn above the shrine seemed to soften when he went there to sit at her feet and stare at nothing. It was not tears, but dew, that gathered under the stone lids, for the night had grown suddenly hot, and everything lay moist in the starlight. Night changed to midnight, and midnight to dawn, and dawn to another day, cloudless, pitiless; and Jack awoke again, and his waking thought was of Lorraine.
All day long he sat with the old vicomte, reading to him when he wished, playing interminable games of chess, sick at heart with a longing that almost amounted to anger. He could not tell his aunt. As far as that went, the wise old lady had divined that their first trouble had come to them in all the appalling and exaggerated proportions that such troubles assume, but she smiled gently to herself, for she, too, had been young, and the ways of lovers had been her ways, and the paths of love she had trodden, and she had drained love's cup at bitter springs.
That night she came to his bedside and kissed him, saying: "To-morrow you shall carry my love and my thanks to Lorraine for her care of the horse."
"I can't," muttered Jack.
"Pooh!" said Madame de Morteyn, and closed the bedroom door; and Jack slept better that night.