He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable.  He stood a moment, but she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to give an order.  By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor of Nature’s cathedral.  Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ.  The darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded.  Even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.

The Countess long remembered that vigil—­for she lay late awake; the cool gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.

“Yet, I believe!” she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself.  “Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!”

And though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which her soul shrank!  The woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for choosing evil, or good, ease for herself or life for others.  But the moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no shame and no suffering seemed—­for the moment at least—­too great a price to pay for the lives of little children.  Love had been taken from her life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity—­that must go, too!

She felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and the common round of the journey put to flight the ideals of the night.  But things fell out in a manner she had not pictured.  They halted before noon on the north bank of the Loir, in a level meadow with lines of poplars running this way and that, and filling all the place with the soft shimmer of leaves.  Blue succory, tiny mirrors of the summer sky, flecked the long grass, and the women picked bunches of them, or, Italian fashion, twined the blossoms in their hair.  A road ran across the meadow to a ferry, but the ferryman, alarmed by the aspect of the party, had conveyed his boat to the other side and hidden himself.

Presently Madame St. Lo espied the boat, clapped her hands and must have it.  The poplars threw no shade, the flies teased her, the life of a hermit—­in a meadow—­was no longer to her taste.