Certainly he was no more the dreamily affectionate companion, a little slow in comprehension but rapid and accurate in execution, upon whose thews and muscles I had been wont to depend. Hugh Deventer was lost to me. More than that, he could hardly any more be said to belong to the family circle at Château Schneider. He had furnished a room for himself down at the works, where he read and slept. His meals were cooked by the wife of the chief night-watchman and at home no one was surprised. For the Deventers were, even before coming of age, in fact as soon as they had left school, a law to themselves. And I think that Dennis was secretly pleased at his boy's setting up for himself.
But I knew that Hugh was not driven by any noble desire for independence. Sitting there in the warm sun which beat upon the bridge parapet, I set aside one possible cause for our estrangement after another.
It was not on account of Jeanne or Rhoda Polly. No jealousy possessed Hugh Deventer because I sat at his father's table far oftener than he did. One reason only could explain all the circumstances. He had been at Autun and had supposed that Alida's idea of coming to the Garden Cottage had originated with me. Evidently he had resented this, and since our return he had kept himself, in all save the most formal fashion, apart from all the rejoicing over the new tenants.
Obviously he must consider himself in love with Alida, which was, of course, wholly natural and within his right. But why vent his humour upon me? I could not make Alida return his love, and certainly sulking in the holes and corners of a factory would do nothing to soften the heart of that imperious little lady. He had indeed become little more than a memory to Alida.
"I don't think Hugh likes me," she said, more than once. "He never comes to see me—not even to tell me how selfish I am!"
CHAPTER XXIV
PEACE BEFORE STORM
The 18th of March dawned clear and bright, the wind still a little chill, but the whole land, as we looked down upon it from our Gobelet watch-tower on the front of St. Andre's hill, tinted white and pink with blossom, almond, peach, pear, plum, and cherry. It was wonderful to see them running up, as it were scrambling over fence and rock scarp, till they broke in a sunshiny spray of hawthorn blossom against the grey walls of the lycée of St. André.
Never was there a quieter day nor one that seemed filled with more happy promise. For the first time Linn and Alida had resumed their old understanding. For there is no doubt that Linn had been somewhat jealous of the absorbing commerce between the house of Deventer and the cottage in the laurel bushes beyond the garden of Gobelet.