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“O take me away from this place!” she said earnestly.

M. Bourget was troubled and anxious, but I whispered that it was only the closeness of the rooms which made Madame feel a little faint. So we got her out quickly into the cool bright sunshine of the Alpine pastures. The Countess Lucia recovered rapidly, but it was a long while before the colour came back to her cheeks.

“That terrible, terrible place!” she said again and again. “I felt as though I were buried alive–shrouded in white, coffined in mort-cloths!”

CHAPTER XI

THE WHITE OWL

To distract her mind I told her tales of the grey city of the North where I had been colleged. I told of the bleak and biting winds which cut their way to the marrow of the bones. I described the students rich and poor, but mostly poor, swarming into the gaunt quadrangles, reading eagerly in the library, hasting grimly to be wise, posting hotfoot to distinction or to death. She listened with eyes intent. “We have something like that in Russia,” she said; “but then, as soon as these students of ours become a little wise, they are cut off, or buried in Siberia.” But I think that, with all her English speech and descent, Lucia never fully understood that these students of ours were wholly free to come or go, talk folly or learn sense, say and do good and evil, according to the freedom of their own wills. I told of our debating societies, where in the course of one debate there is often enough treason talked to justify Siberia–and yet, after all, the subject under discussion would only be, “Is the present Government worthy of the confidence of the country?”

“And then what happens? What does the Government say?” asked Lucia.

“Ah, Countess!” I said, “in my country the Government does not care to know what does not concern it. It sits aloft and aloof. The Government does not care for the chatter of all the young fools in its universities.”

So in the tranced seclusion of this Alpine valley the summer of the year went by. The flowers carpeted the meadows, merging from pink and blue to crimson and russet, till with the first snow the Countess and her brother announced their intention of taking flight–she to the Court of the South, and he to his estates in the North.

The night before her departure we walked together by the lake. She was charmingly arrayed in a scarlet cloak lined with soft brown fur; and I thought–for I was but three-and-twenty–that the turned-up collar threw out her chin in an adorable manner. She looked like a girl. And indeed, as it proved, for that night she was a girl.

At first she seemed a little sad, and when I spoke of seeing her again at the Court of the South she remained silent, so that I thought she feared the trouble of having us on her hands there. So in a moment I chilled, and would have taken my hand from hers, had she permitted it. But suddenly, in a place where there are sands and pebbly beaches by the lakeside, she turned and drew me nearer to her, holding me meantime by the hand.

“You will not go and forget?” she said. “I have many things to forget. I want to remember this–this good year and this fair place and you. But you, with your youth and your innocent Scotland–you will go and forget. Perhaps you already long to go back thither.”

I desired to tell her that I had never been so happy in my life. I might have told her that and more, but in her fierce directness she would not permit me.

“There is a maid who sits in one of the tall grey houses of which you speak, or among the moorland farms–sits and waits for you, and you write to her. You are always writing–writing. It is to that girl. You will pass away and think no more of Lucia!”