There was trouble, and the ways of Laure’s people were devious and hard. It was said that she must go to the convent again, and they kept her prisoner in the house. One day they brought her a letter which, they said, was from Armand. It told her that he was going away, and that he had given her up. She had never seen his writing—they had trusted nothing to the village post-office—and she believed that the letter was from him. She had wept so much that tears were all done; her eyes only ached now. At first she thought that she would get away and go to him, and beg him not to give her up—what does a child know of pride all at once? But the pride came to her a little later, and she tried to think what she must do. While her thoughts went waving to and fro, and she could make nothing of them, she heard all the time the long, sighing breath of the eddy and the cling-clung of the force-pump. She never slept, and after a time it grew in her mind that she never would sleep till she went down to the cedar tree and the eddy; they seemed always calling her. She had said her Ave Marias over and over again, but they seemed to do her no good. Nothing could quiet her, not even the music of the twelfth mass, played on the little reed organ by the organist of St. Savior’s, when they took her to church against 15 her will—a passive rebel. The next day she was to go to the convent again.
That night she stole from the house into the light of the soft harvest moon, and ran down through the garden, over the road, and into the cedar thicket. She did not hear behind her the footsteps of a man who, night after night, had watched the house, hoping that she would come out. She hastened to the cedar tree, and looked down into the eddy. From far up the river there came the plaintive cry of a loon; but she heard no other sound in the night, save this and the cling-clung of the ram muffled by fallen branches, and the loud-breathing eddy which invited—until an arm ran round her waist and held her fast.
A minute later he said: “You will come, then? And we shall be man and wife very quick.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, and she picked up handfuls of leaves and dropped them softly into the funnel of water.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“I am a cock-robin,” she said with her old gayety. “There’s a girl drowned there. Yes, but it’s true. She was a good Catholic and unhappy. I’m a heretic now, and happy.”
But she said her Ave Marias again just the same; being happy, they did her more good. And she says that the eddy is spiteful to her now. It had counted on a different end to her wooing.