“Do you like Sylvia’s song?” she asked, turning her head to listen. “It is a very old song—a very, very old one—centuries old. It’s all about the English, how they came to harry our coasts in those days—and it has almost a hundred verses!” Something of the Bretonne came into her eyes for a moment, that shadow of sadness, that patient fatalism in which, too, there is something of distrust. The next instant her eyes cleared and she smiled.
“The Trécourts suffered much from the English raiders. I am a Trécourt, you know. That song was made about us—about a young girl, Yvonne de Trécourt, who was carried away by the English. She was foolish; she had a lover among the Saxons,... and she set a signal for him, and they came and sacked the town, and carried her away, and that was what she got for her folly.”
She bent her head thoughtfully; the sound of the sea grew louder in the room; a yellow light stole out of the west and touched the window-panes, slowly deepening to orange; against it the fruit trees stood, a leafless tracery of fragile branches.
“It is the winter awaking, very far away,” she said, under her breath.
Something in the hollow monotone of the sea made me think again of the low grumble of restless lions. The sound was hateful. Why should it steal in here—why haunt me even in this one spot in all the world where a world-tired man had found a moment’s peace in a woman’s eyes.
“Are you troubled?” she asked, then colored at her 262 own question, as though deeming the impulse to speak unwarranted.
“No, not troubled. Happiness is often edged with a shadow. I am content to be here.”
She bent her head and looked at the heavy rose lying in solitary splendor on the table. The polished wood reflected it in subdued tints of saffron.
“It is a strange friendship,” I said.
“Ours?... yes.”