The man did not move from the window, but stood staring in morose silence at the reddening west. Hunched shoulders and bowed head gave a certain powerful pathos to the figure statuesque and silent against the crimson curtain of the sky. The very air of the room seemed burdened and saturated with the gloomy melancholy of the man's mood. War, with its thousand horrors, furrowed his brow and bowed his great shoulders beneath its bloody yoke. Her woman's instinct told her that he was lonely, for the soul that had ministered to him breathed for him no more.
He turned on her suddenly with a terse greeting that startled her thoughts like doves in a pine wood.
"Welcome to you, Lady of Gambrevault."
There was a bluff bitterness in his voice that forewarned her of his ample wisdom. Colgran had surrendered her, heart and tragedy in one, to Fulviac's mercy. A looming cloud of passion shadowed the man's face, making him seem gaunt and rough to her for the moment. She remembered him standing over Duessa's body in Sforza's palace at Gilderoy. Life had too little promise for her to engender fear of any man, even of Fulviac at his worst.
"I trust, Madame Yeoland, that you are merry?"
The taunt touched her, yet she answered him listlessly enough.
"Do what you will; scoff if it pleases you."
Fulviac shrugged his shoulders, and tossed his lion's mane from his broad forehead.
"It is a grim world this," he said; "when thrones burn, should we seek to quench them with our tears! Whose was the fault that God made you too much a woman? Red heart, heart of the rose, a traitorous comrade art thou, and an easy foe."
She had no answer on her lips, and he turned and paced the room before her, darting swift glances into her face.