Garlotte came out from the cottage, and was kissed by Pelleas on the lips. The girl’s eyes were red and heavy; she had been crying but a moment ago in the shadow of the cottage room, and she was timid and very solemn. Pelleas looked at her like a big brother.
“Come now, little sister,” he said, with a rare smile; “methinks you must be in love too by your looks.”
“Yes, lord.”
“Said I not so? You women take things so to heart.”
“Yes, lord.”
“What a solemn face, little sister!”
Garlotte mastered herself for a moment, then burst into tears and ran back into the cottage. Pelleas coloured, looked troubled, glanced at Igraine, thinking he had hurt the girl’s heart with his words. Igraine’s face startled him as if the visage of death had risen up suddenly amid the flowers. He stood mute before her watching her starved lips, her drawn face, her eyes that stared beyond him with a kind of cold frenzy.
“Pelleas, Pelleas!”
It was like the wild cry of a woman over her dead love. The sound struck Pelleas with a vague sense of stupendous woe, a dim prophecy of evil like the noise of autumn in the woods. Before he could gather words, Igraine had turned and run from him as in great fear, skirting the pool and holding for the black yawn of the forest aisles. Pelleas started to follow her in a daze of wonder. Was the girl mad? Had love turned her brain? What was there hid in her heart that made her wing from him like a dove from a hawk?
By the trees Igraine slackened and turned breathless on the man as he came towards her through the long grass. Her eyes were dim and frightened, her lips twitching, and there was a bleak hunted look upon her face that made her seem white and old. Pelleas’s blood ran cold in him like water; a vague dread sapped his manhood; he stared at Igraine and was speechless.