Robin went to his bed in the room beside the chapel, but not to sleep. The darkness and the silence of the night intensified the misery of his moral loneliness and held him yet more at the mercy of his conscience. Toss and turn as he would, he could not escape from the conviction that his cowardice had been discovered and that the Sieur de Tinteniac was coming, like some stern St. Michael, to smite and to condemn. Even as a man upon the mountains may see the image of his own body magnified and distorted by the mist, so the lad’s conscious guilt took fright at its own fear. He sat shivering in bed, his teeth chattering, his face white with the moonlight that poured into the room. Alone, in the silence of the night, he was like a frightened child, who yearns for a mother’s warm arms and words of comfort.
It was past midnight when Tiphaïne was awakened by hearing some one knocking at her door. She sat up in bed and listened, the moonlight falling across the coverlet and touching her white arms and bosom.
Again she heard a hand knocking on the carved panels of the door.
“Who’s there?”
Since no voice answered her, she slipped out of bed, and, throwing a long cloak about her, opened the door and looked out into the passage. Leaning against the wall, with its hands over its face, Tiphaïne saw a dim and shrinking figure, the figure of her brother.
“Robin!”
She stood with one hand on the door, looking at Robin, a strained wonder on her face.
“Robin, what is it?—are you ill?”
She heard him groan as though in pain.
“Tiphaïne, my God, what shall I do? It is all a lie—a miserable lie!”