Lorraine, A Romance

During the next three days, for the first time since he had known her, he did not go to see Lorraine. How he stood it--how he ever dragged through those miserable hours--he himself never could understand.

The wide sculptured eyes of Our Lady of Morteyn above the shrine seemed to soften when he went there to sit at her feet and stare at nothing. It was not tears, but dew, that gathered under the stone lids, for the night had grown suddenly hot, and everything lay moist in the starlight. Night changed to midnight, and midnight to dawn, and dawn to another day, cloudless, pitiless; and Jack awoke again, and his waking thought was of Lorraine.

All day long he sat with the old vicomte, reading to him when he wished, playing interminable games of chess, sick at heart with a longing that almost amounted to anger. He could not tell his aunt. As far as that went, the wise old lady had divined that their first trouble had come to them in all the appalling and exaggerated proportions that such troubles assume, but she smiled gently to herself, for she, too, had been young, and the ways of lovers had been her ways, and the paths of love she had trodden, and she had drained love's cup at bitter springs.

That night she came to his bedside and kissed him, saying: "To-morrow you shall carry my love and my thanks to Lorraine for her care of the horse."

"I can't," muttered Jack.

"Pooh!" said Madame de Morteyn, and closed the bedroom door; and Jack slept better that night.

It was ten o'clock the next morning before he appeared at breakfast, and it was plain, even to the thrush on the lawn outside, that he had bestowed an elaboration upon his toilet that suggested either a duel or a wedding.

Madame de Morteyn hid her face, for she could not repress the smile that tormented her sweet mouth. Even the vicomte said: "Oh! You're not off for Paris, Jack, are you?"

After breakfast he wandered moodily out to the terrace, where his aunt found him half an hour later, mooning and contemplating his spotless gloves.

"Then you are not going to ride over to the Château de Nesville?" she asked, trying not to laugh.

"Oh!" he said, with affected surprise, "did you wish me to go to the Château?"

"Yes, Jack dear, if you are not too much occupied." She could not repress the mischievous accent on the "too." "Are you going to drive?"

"No; I shall walk--unless you are in a hurry."

"No more than you are, dear," she said, gravely.