and breathing into her heart once more. And then she remembered Marthe's eyes of resurrection; Marthe's face as, at the gate, on the spring evening when they had first found each other, she had laid Jill's hand against her cheek and said, 'This dear heart will be kind to everything.' How could she have dreamed that the past was spoiled? The past, and Marthe as she had known her in it, was the one sure thing.
She stood there, softly breathing in her convalescence, aged, had she known it, by those moments of experience as decades of her former life could not have aged her, and the last thought that came to her—from the chiff-chaff's song, from the memory of Marthe's face and Marthe's words—was of a hunted fox; and then of a hunted cat. The wretched old lady down there below the woods. What had she been suffering? And was not her suffering the worst of all?
'I must see her,' Jill muttered to herself. And it seemed now clearly the next step. She could not leave Buissac without seeing her; in kindness, if that were possible. She must try to make her own that she had lied, but to make her feel that even if she had lied she was understood, not hated. 'I might have been just as bad myself,' thought Jill. 'We're all one. Just as Marthe said.' She went on down the path towards the Manoir.
As she entered the Manoir gate she heard the half-slumberous yet sinister reverberations of distant thunder. The sound of it was like a great snake dragging itself in dusty rolls and coils along the horizon. She
