A Woman's Will Part 41

"Yes, but you do not smile as before your cousin is come. I want you to smile. Oh," he exclaimed, suddenly interrupting himself, "have you ride horseback since I left?"

"Oh, yes, almost every day."

His face clouded slightly.

"Who have you ride with?"

"With my friends who are here, and twice with the lieutenant."

Then his face clouded very heavily.

"Is he interesting?" he asked; "yes?"

"It was the Englischergarten that was wonderful," she told him. "We rode very early in the morning and the dew was on the gra.s.s and we could hear the pheasants in the underbrush when the noise of the horses' feet frightened them further away."

"And the lieutenant?" he asked.

"And oh," she continued, "you know that place where the woods open so widely, and you can see so far across,--_eh bien_, we saw one morning the deer standing in the edge of the forest just there, one would have said fifty miles from civilization, not at all as if they were in the midst of Munich."

"And the lieutenant?" he repeated.

"And then another day the clouds of morning mist were so thick that we could see their outlines as they lay upon the earth, and ride into them and ride out of them,--a quite new experience for me."

"But the lieutenant?" he exclaimed impatiently, "the lieutenant? what did he talk of? what did you speak together of?"

Rosina laughed, nodding merrily over his impatience.

"We talked of the pheasants," she said, "of the deer, of the fog. Are you satisfied?"

He shrugged his shoulders, his frown lifted.

"It is quite one to me," he said indifferently; "you know that I have said before that I am not of a _temperament jaloux_."

Then he got up and walked about the room, taking a cigar from his pocket and holding it unlighted in his mouth.

"May I smoke here?" he asked.

"I don't care if you do."

He returned suddenly to his chair, laid the cigar on the table, and took her hand again.

"Your cousin is so nice," he told her, as if the recollection of Jack's charms had necessitated his at once expressing his feelings towards Jack's cousin.

"When is he coming back?" she asked.

"In one week."

"When does he sail? Do you know?"

"On the nineteenth day, from Genoa."

She quite sprang from her seat.

"Not really!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, so he tell me."

He drew her back into her chair and she forgot the hand which he still held in her desperate feeling of the instant. She was helplessly choked with conflicting emotions. October instead of December! That came of having a cousin!

The kingdom of the other chair advanced its border-line more than two inches, and she did not appear to notice the bold encroachment.

"What does it matter?" she asked herself bitterly; "in a few days I'm going, and then I shall never lay eyes on him again," and the tears welled up thickly at the thought.

"_Qu'est-ce que vous avez?_" he said anxiously; "you must not cry when I am returned, you know!"

At that she sobbed outright.

He looked at her with an intentness very foreign to his usual expression, and seemed to weigh two courses of action and deliberate as to their relative advisability; he ended by laying her hand down gently and going to the window, where he remained for several minutes, looking out and saying nothing.

She dried her eyes quickly and quietly (only a foolish woman continues to weep after the man has gone), and waited for him to turn. Finally he did so.

"It is not raining once more," he said; "let us go out and walk far.

That will do you quite well; I cannot bear that you weep."

He added the last words in a lower tone, and coming close behind her chair suddenly stooped.

She realized all in a flash where he was, what he was meditating, the half-open door, and writhed quickly out of the chair and away.

"Why not?" he asked, looking after her unsmilingly. "It will do you no hurt and me much good."

"I'm out of the habit," she said shortly, recollecting Jack's words on that famous night of his arrival.

They were both on their feet, she by the window and he by the chair which she had just left.

"Was your husband very _tendre_?" he asked.

She felt the corners of her mouth give way under the stressful shock of this question. "I might say, 'I never tried him to see,'" she thought, "but he _never_ would understand," and so there was an instant of silence.

"Why do you smile?" he demanded, smiling himself.

"Because we don't call men 'tender.' We call meat 'tender' and men 'affectionate.'"

"But I _am_ tender," he affirmed.

"Are you? Well, you are younger than my husband and perhaps that accounts for it."

He reflected, but did not appear to understand; finally he gave it up for a bad job and said, changing to a less abstruse subject:

"We go to walk? yes?"