But if he had
missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak? Why did he not cry
the alarm, search and question and pursue? Why did he not give her that
opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her
resolution died within her?
Above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? Of the snatches
of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of
astonishment? Of the parades which his horse, catching the infection,
made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught
it?
Ay, what? Why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been
robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his
melancholy and ride like the youngest? She wondered what the men
thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him
stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. What were they
thinking of it? She could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent
than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began
to grip her heart.
Twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which
the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had
shaken under her. But the cool freshness of the early summer morning,
and the sight of the green landscape and the winding Loir, beside which
their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown
himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting
hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have
faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth.
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