and shrewd face, whom she feared. She breathed more easily when the old Frenchwoman was gone. . . .
The bedchamber where she was to sleep had also been left unaltered for a hundred years and more. It was hung with faded lavender silk, and on the floor lay an Aubusson carpet, while at the farther end of the room was the wide, low, Directoire bed which had been brought from the Paris of the young Napoleon.
The telephone of which Treville had told her stood on a table close to her pillow. How amazed would Julie have been to hear that a day would come when a woman lying in what had been her bed would be able to speak from there to her lover – the man who, like Julie’s own lover, was master of the great house which stood over a mile away from The Folly.
Celestine had forgotten to draw the heavy embroidered yellow silk curtains, and Laura walked to the nearest window and looked out on to the gleaming waters of the lake.
Across to the right rose dense clumps of dark ilexes; to the left tall trees, now stripped of leaves, stood black and drear against the winter sky.
The telephone bell tinkled. She turned and ran across the room, and then she heard Julian Treville’s voice as strong, as clear, as love-laden, as if he were with her here, tonight.
The next day’s sun illumined a beautiful soft winter morning, and Laura felt not only tremblingly happy, but also what she had not thought to feel – at peace. She went for a walk round the lake, then enjoyed the luncheon Celestine had prepared for her. Celestine, so much was clear, was set on waiting on her far more assiduously than she did on her own mistress, old Mrs Treville.
About three o’clock Laura went again out of doors, to come in, an hour later, to find the lamp in the drawing- room lit, though it was not yet dark.
She went through into her bedroom, and then she heard the telephone ring – not loudly, insistently, as it had rung last night, but with a thin, tenuous sound.
Eagerly she went over to the side of the bed and took off the receiver, and then, as if coming from infinitely far away, she heard Julian Treville’s voice.
“Are you there, my darling? I am in darkness, but our love is my beacon, and my heart is full of you,” and his voice, his dear voice, sank away . . .
Then he was home from hunting far sooner than he had thought to be? This surely meant that very soon he would be here.
She took off her hat and coat, put on a frock Julian had once said he loved to see her wear, and then went back to wait for his coming in the sitting-room. But the moments became minutes, and the minutes quarters of an hour, and the time went by very slowly.
At last a key turned in the lock of the front door, and she stood up – then felt a pang of bitter disappointment, for it was only the old Frenchwoman who passed through into the room.
Celestine shut the door behind her, and then she came close up to where Laura had sat down again, wearily, by the fire.
“Madame!” she exclaimed. And then she stopped short, a tragic look on her pale withered face.
Laura’s thoughts flew to her child. She leapt up from her chair. “What is it, Celestine? A message for me?”
Very solemnly Celestine said the fearful words: “Prepare for ill news.”
“Ill news?” Oh! how could she have left her child? “What do you mean?” cried Laura violently.
“There is no message come for you. But – but – our good kind master, Mr Treville, is dead. He was killed out hunting today. I was in the village when the news was brought.” She went on, speaking in quick gasps: “His horse – how say you?—” she waited, and then, finding the word she sought, “stumbled,” she sobbed.
Laura for a moment stood still, as if she had not heard, or did not understand the purport of, the other’s words, and then she gave a strangled cry, as Celestine, gathering her to her gaunt breast, said quickly in French, “My poor, poor lady! Well did I see that my master loved you – and that you loved him. You must leave The Folly tonight, at once. They have already telegraphed for old Mrs Treville.”
3
An hour later Laura was dressed, ready for departure. In a few minutes from now Celestine would be here to carry her bag to the car which the old Frenchwoman had procured to take her to the distant station where Julian Treville had met her yesterday. Yesterday? It seemed ?ons of time ago.
Suddenly there came a loud knock on the heavy door, and at once she walked across the room and opened it wide.
Nothing mattered to her now; and when Roger Delacourt strode into the room she felt scarce any surprise, and that though she had believed him a thousand miles away.
“Are you alone, Laura?” he asked harshly.
There was a look of savage anger in his face. His vanity – the vanity of a man no longer young who has had a strong allure for women – felt bruised in its tenderest part.
As she said nothing, only looked at him with an air of tragic pain and defiance, he went on, jeeringly, “No doubt you are asking yourself how I found out where you were, and on what pretty business you were engaged? I will give you a clue, and you can guess the rest for yourself. I had to come back unexpectedly to England, and the one person to whom you gave this address – I presume so you might have news of the boy – unwittingly gave you away!”
She still said nothing, and he went on bitterly: “I thought you – fool that I was – a good woman. But from what I hear I now know that your lover, Julian Treville, is no new friend. But I do not care, I do not enquire, how often you have been here—”
“This is the first time,” she said dully, “that I have been here.”
And then it was as if something outside herself impelled her to add the untrue words, “I am not, as you seem to think, Roger, alone—” for with a sharp thrill of intense fear she had remembered her child.
“Not alone?” he repeated incredulously. And then he saw the tapestried curtain which hung over the door, opposite to where he stood, move, and he realized that someone was behind it, listening.
He took a few steps forward, and pulled the curtain roughly back. But the dimly illumined corridor was empty; whoever had been there eavesdropping had scurried away into shelter.
He came back to the spot where he had been standing before. Baffled, angry, still full of doubt, and yet, deep in his heart, unutterably relieved. Already a half-suspicion that Laura was sheltering some woman friend engaged in an intrigue had flashed into his mind, and the suspicion crystallised into certainty as he looked loweringly into her pale, set face. She did not look as more than once, in the days of his good fortunes, he had seen a guilty wife look.
Yes, that must be the solution of this queer secret escapade! Laura, poor fool! had been the screen behind which hid a pair of guilty lovers. Thirty years ago a woman had played the same thankless part in an intrigue of his own.
“Who is your friend?” he asked roughly.
Her lips did not move, and he told himself, with a certain satisfaction, that she was paralysed with fear.
“How long have you and your friend been here? That, at least, you can tell me.”
At last she whispered what sounded like the absurd answer, “Just a hundred years.”
Then, turning quickly, she went through the door which gave into the dining-room, and shut it behind her.
Roger Delacourt began pacing about the room; he felt what he had very seldom come to feel in his long, hard, if till now fortunate, life, just a little foolish, but relieved – unutterably relieved – and glad.
The Folly? Well named indeed! The very setting for a secret love-affair. Beautiful, too, in its strange and romantic aloofness from everyday life.
He went and gazed up at the pastel, which was the only picture in the room. What an exquisite, flower-like face! It reminded him of a French girl he had known when he was a very young man. Her name had been Zelie Mignard, and she had been reader-companion to an old marquise with whose son he had spent a long summer and autumn on the Loire. From the first moment he had seen Zelie she had attracted him violently, and though little more than a boy, he had made up his mind to seduce her. But she had resisted him, and then, in spite of himself, he had come to love her with that ardent first love which returns no more.
Suddenly there fell on the air of the still room the sound of a long, deep sigh. He wheeled sharply round to
