“Would it amuse you to hear what I have been?” I said, smiling.
“That is not the word,” she said, quietly. “To hear of hardship helps one to understand the world.”
The cannonade had been growing so loud again that it was with difficulty that we could make ourselves audible to each other. The jar of the discharges began to dislodge bits of glass and little triangular pieces of plaster, and the solid walls of the tower shook till even the mirror began to sway and the tarnished gilt sconces to quiver in their sockets.
“I wish you were not in Morsbronn,” I said.
“I feel safer here in my own house than I should at La Trappe,” she replied.
She was probably thinking of the dead Uhlan and of poor Bazard; perhaps of the wretched exposure of Buckhurst—the man she had trusted and who had proved to be a swindler, and a murderous one at that.
Suddenly a shell fell into the court-yard opposite, bursting immediately in a cloud of gravel which rained against our turret like hail.
Stunned for an instant, the Countess stood there motionless, her face turned towards the window. I struggled to sit upright.
She looked calmly at me; the color came back into her face, and in spite of my remonstrance she walked to the window, closed the heavy outside shutters and the blinds. As she was fastening them I heard the whizzing quaver of another shell, the racket of its explosion, the crash of plaster.