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Updated: June 13, 2025
The latch clicked, the door opened, and a cloaked figure entered, the shriek of the storm behind. The door closed again. The intruder took a step forward, his hat came off, the cloak was loosed and dropped upon the floor. Guida's premonition had been right: It was Philip. She did not speak.
Maitresse Aimable's face grew hotter; she did not speak, but patted Guida's back with her heavy hand and nodded complacently. "Have you always loved him?" asked Guida again, with an eager inquisition, akin to that of a wayside sinner turned chapel-going saint, hungry to hear what chanced to others when treading the primrose path.
Now, if the devil had sent a wise imp to have watch and ward of this man and this maid, and report to him upon the meeting of their ways, the moment Philip took Guida's hand, and her eyes met his, monsieur the reporter of Hades might have clapped-to his book and gone back to his dark master with the message and the record: "The hour of Destiny is struck."
Guida's brain was a hundred times clearer than theirs. Danger, peril to her child, had aroused in her every force of intelligence; she had the daring, the desperation of the lioness fighting for her own. Philip himself solved the problem. Turning to the bench of jurats, he said quietly: "She is quite right; the law of Haro is with her. It must apply." The Court was in a greater maze than ever.
Guida's once blithe, rose-coloured face was pale as ivory, the mouth had a look of deep sadness, and the step was slow; but the eye was clear and steady, and her hair, brushed under the black crape of the bonnet as smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of rare attraction and sombre nobility.
Of course she must understand he would write constantly, telling her, as through a kind of diary, what he was doing every day, and then when the chance came the big budget should go to her. A pain came to Guida's heart as she read the flowing tale of his buoyant love.
"Naughty Carterette," she said at herself with admiring reproach, as she looked in Guida's mirror, and added, glancing with farcical approval round the room, "and it all shines like peacock's feather, too!" Guida longed to snatch the letter from Carterette's hand and read it, but she only said calmly, though the words fluttered in her throat: "You're as gay as a chaffinch, Garcon Carterette."
The new-found knowledge was diffused in her character, expressed in her face. Seldom had a day of Guida's life been so busy. It seemed to her that people came and went far more than usual. She talked, she laughed a little, she answered back the pleasantries of the seafaring folk who passed her doorway or her garden. She was attentive to her grandfather; exact with her household duties.
The fruit that hung above Guida's head was not fairer and sweeter than she. Philip drew her to him, and her eyes lifted to his. "Is that love, Philip?" she repeated. "Tell me, for I do not know it has all come so soon. You are wiser; do not deceive me; you understand, and I do not. Philip, do not let me deceive myself."
Was that their lot, their destiny? Must they begin in blind faith, then be plunged into the darkness of disillusion, shaken by the storm of emotion, taste the sting in the fruit of the tree of knowledge and go on again the same, yet not the same? More or less incoherently these thoughts flitted through Guida's mind. As yet her experiences were too new for her to fasten securely upon their meaning.
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