“Gratitude!” chirped the girl. “Gratitude to whom?”
“To the Lord Saviour, madame, and the Mother Virgin.”
She half laughed in his face, but his eyes sobered her. For a moment she fronted him with an incredulous smirk, then her glance wavered, and lowered to his breast. It held there with a tense stare, while her whole face hardened. Pelleas saw her pupils darken, her cheeks flush and pale in a moment. He thought nothing of it, or ascribed her distraught and strange look to some sudden shame or shock of penitence. In a trice the smile was back again, and she seemed pert and pleased as ever.
“I see you are too devout for me,” she said with a glib laugh, “and that I am too wicked a thing for the moment. I will leave you to Sister Igraine till you both have prayed your fill.” Here she laughed again, a laugh that made Igraine’s cheeks burn. “Remember me to St. Anthony if you may. If I recollect rightly he was a nice old gentleman, who cured ‘the fire’ for a miracle, and nearly fell in love with a devil. Till you have done, I will go and gather flowers.”
Pelleas and Igraine looked at one another.
“A devout child,” said the man.
“And not bred in a nunnery.”
“The world’s convent, I should say.”
For the moment Igraine was almost for telling him of her own hypocrisy, but the thought found her more troubled on that score than she could have guessed. She had acted a lie to the man, and feared his true eyes despite her courage. “Another day I will tell him,” she thought; “it is not so great a sin after all.” So they turned and knelt at their devotions.
Morgan la Blanche went away like the wind. She ran through atrium and porch with hate free in her eyes, and her child’s face twisted into a scowl of temper. In the garden she idled up and down awhile in a restless fume, like one whose thoughts bubble bodingly. Sometimes she would smite a lily peevishly with her open hand, or pluck a flower and trample it under her feet as though it had wronged her. Then she would take something from her bosom and stare at it while her lips worked, or while she bit her fingers as though galled by some inward barb. Presently she found her way by a laurel walk to the orchard, and thence by a wicket-gate to the island’s rim, where one of her men kept watch on the further meadows.