Then suddenly she felt the gaze of the lady over the hearth, and looked up.
"I, too, have known," the enigmatical, half-closed eyes said to her--"and I have been dust and ashes these many years--and so shall you be, and so shall he." O, it was awfully, cruelly true! "Please God I die first!" she thought, and sliding her hand round Armand's neck kissed the head on her knee to register the hope.
Next morning, amid all the clatter of an early departure, she bent forward from the chaise for a last look at the place of so much happiness. The transient snow had melted, and the château stood as she had first seen it.
"I wonder shall I ever be so happy anywhere," she murmured. "Good-bye, dear house!"
"It appears to me," said Armand gaily, "that my wife is on the way to love the house better than its owner."
No articulate response was, naturally, required to this accusation, but after a moment Horatia said, still a little wistfully, "I wish it were not all over!"
"You belong to the Romantics, mon amie, that is clear," observed her husband, laughing outright. "And it is only just beginning." He drew her head down to his shoulder, and the horses sprang forward on the first stage to Paris.
Chartres, encircling its jewel of stone, was gone like the dreams which Horatia might have dreamed there the previous night if excitement had not kept her wakeful, and now, Versailles, Sèvres, and Passy left in turn behind the wheels of their chaise, she was entering Paris for the first time in her life. This was really the Seine that they were crossing, this river sparkling in the early afternoon sun of New Year's Eve, and the golden dome glittering in front of them was the Invalides. Streams of people were passing on the bridge as they crossed it.
"Ah, but wait till to-morrow," said Armand. "Yes, it is cheerful, but what an awful thing to look forward to is New Year's Day! Truly we French are the last of idiots to have made this annual giving of presents into a nightmare, as we have. And such presents, too! Last year inkpots were all the rage--inkpots in the shape of mandarins, of apples, of crayfishes--que sais-je? Everything you took up was an inkpot. Mercifully you could not put any ink in them.... Look, mon ange, there is one of the new omnibuses!--Here we are in the Rue St. Dominique already!"