"You were late then?" His cold eye returned to Claude. "You were late, I warrant. Attend me to-morrow at nine, young man. Do you hear? Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Then have a care you are there, or the officers will fetch you. And you," he continued, turning more graciously to Anne, "see, young woman, you keep counsel. A still tongue buys friends, and is a service to the State. With that—good-night."
He looked from one to the other with a sour smile, nodded, and passed out.
He left Claude staring, and something bewildered in the middle of the room. The love, the pity, the admiration of which the lad's heart had been full an hour before, still hungered for expression; but it was not easy to vent such feelings before Louis, nor at a moment when the Syndic's cold eye and the puzzle of his presence there chilled for the time the atmosphere of the room.
Claude, indeed, was utterly perplexed by what he had seen; and before he could decide what he would do, Anne, ignoring the need of explanation, had taken the matter into her own hands. She had begun to set out the meal; and Louis, smiling maliciously, had seated himself in his place. To speak with any effect then, or to find words adequate to the feelings that had moved him a while before, was impossible. A moment later, the opportunity was gone.
"You must please to wait on yourselves," the girl said wearily. "My mother is not well, and I may not come down again this evening." As she spoke, she lifted from the table the little tray which she had prepared.
He was in time to open the door for her; and even then, had she glanced at him, his eyes must have told her much, perhaps enough. But she did not look at him. She was preoccupied with her own thoughts; pressing thoughts they must have been. She passed him as if he had been a stranger, her eyes on the tray. Worshipping, he stood, and saw her turn the corner at the head of the flight; then with a full heart he went back to his place. His time would come.
And she? At the door of Basterga's room she paused and stood long in thought, gazing at the rushlight she carried on the tray—yet seeing nothing. A sentence, one sentence of all those which Blondel had poured forth—not Blondel the austere Syndic, who had set the lads aside as if they had been schoolboys, but Blondel the man, trembling, holding out suppliant hands—rang again and again in her ears.
"It is health of body, though you be dying as I am, and health of mind, though you be possessed of devils!" Health of body! Health of mind! Health of body! Health of mind! The words wrote themselves before her eyes in letters of fire. Health of Body! Health of Mind!