CHAPTER XXVI.  TEMPER.

It was his gaiety, that strange unusual gaiety, still continuing, which on the following day began by perplexing and ended by terrifying the Countess.  She could not doubt that he had missed the packet on which so much hung and of which he had indicated the importance.  But if he had missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak?  Why did he not cry the alarm, search and question and pursue?  Why did he not give her that opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her resolution died within her?

Above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment?  Of the snatches of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of astonishment?  Of the parades which his horse, catching the infection, made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught it?

Ay, what?  Why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been robbed of that of which he must give account—­why did he cast off his melancholy and ride like the youngest?  She wondered what the men thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together.  What were they thinking of it?  She could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began to grip her heart.

Twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had shaken under her.  But the cool freshness of the early summer morning, and the sight of the green landscape and the winding Loir, beside which their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth.

But his new mood veiled she knew not what.  It seemed, if she comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit.  Before it her heart became as water.  Even her colour little by little left her cheeks.  She knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now guiltily sought and now avoided his.  And feeling sure that he did read it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her perplexity.