Later she went downstairs and opened the door of the breakfast room upon the Guardians of the Honour.
As she stood looking at them she felt that her clothes were the clothes of some one who had spent hours in the forest--that her eyes gave out a gay picture of all that was behind them--her adventures must shout aloud from her hands, her feet.
"Upstairs," said Fanny, contentedly, and marvelled.
She had only to open and close her lips a dozen times, bid them form the words: "I have been out all night," to turn those browsing herds of benevolence into an ambush of threatening horns, lowered at her. Almost ... she would _like_ to have said the sentence.
But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third breakfast.
All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks, sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered, breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise, which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under its banks.
With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and fell into the garden--leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the dawn--streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet, and towers of wood.
In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of aspect, Fanny left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the familiar words "and return" were not upon it.
She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.
All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the villa--and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the bonnet--she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her, followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a thawing forest.