There was no bitterness in Bertrand’s eyes.
“You have a great heart in you.”
“Bertrand, you understand?”
“God bless you, yes.”
She went to him suddenly and took his hands.
“Patience.”
And in her eyes he might have read the dawning truth.
XLII
In the Abbot’s parlor at Lehon there was a window that looked out upon the abbey garden, with its sunny stretch of turf, broad beds of herbs and vegetables, its barrier of aspen-trees about the orchard, an orchard rich in Pucelle de Flanders, St. Reols, and Caillon pears, cherries, and quinces, and pearmain apples. At this same window stood the Abbot Stephen, and behind him, half in the shadow, a girl in a gray hood and cloak and a man in black and rusty harness. The window was shaded, moreover, by a swinging lattice and by the red flowers and green leaves of a climbing rose, whose tendrils wavered athwart the blue of the summer sky.
Below, in the garden, between two broad bands of beans in flower, a young man in a russet-colored cassock was stooping over an onion-bed, holding a basket woven of osier twigs in one hand, while with the other he pulled up weeds. From time to time he stood up as though to stretch himself, or took to crawling between the rows, pushing the basket before him and throwing the weeds into it as he worked. The cowl of the cassock was turned back, leaving his head with its cropped hair bare to the sun.