may lead. She has loved freely—as her heart led her to love. There are degrees of disintegration and she was far from having reached the lowest. And, strange as it may seem to you, I respect Marthe Ludérac. I respect her courage; her strength of will. I cannot forget the beautiful devotion to her mother, nor what blood it is that runs in her veins, urging her towards destruction.'
Though she spoke so rightly, and with such a ring of just disdain, Graham did not show her any sign of approbation. He remained, apparently, unmoved, and his expression even betrayed an offensive scepticism. And still he was not thinking of the old lady. She was a crow, merely, that croaked from the battlement, and all the omens seemed hatefully to assent to her loathsome ditty. It was something dark as well as something radiant that had drawn him to Marthe Ludérac from the beginning. Something fateful, boding, had hung round her figure from the first moment when he had seen her coming like a ghost, all white and black, round the corner of the house. From the first he had known her attitude towards him to be ambiguous. But his bitterness was for himself. That he should have found meanings so mysterious for a reality so miserable;—his Eurydice, shining and immortal in her grave-clothes, only a pitiful little courtesan. Madame de Lamouderie sat there, her eyes upon him, and in her presence he could not probe the darkness that opened within him. The faint, haughty smile fixed upon his face was the veil he held between them.
