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His house is next to the church at Olmeta and faces north-west; so that in the summer the evening sun glares across the valley into its windows. He was no great scholar, and had but a poor record in the archives of the college at Corte. Lory de Vasselot had written in a hurry, and the letter was a long one.
She took him by the arm, and turned him towards a mirror, half hidden in hot-house flowers. "Look!" she cried again. "Mon Dieu! it is a tragedy, your face. What is it?" Lory shrugged his shoulders. "I was at Woerth," he explained, "two days ago. I suppose Woerth will be written for life in the face of every Frenchman who was there. They were three to one. They are three to one wherever we turn."
That, and a single memory the secret, perhaps, which was such a standing joke at the school in the Rue du Cherche-Midi made up the whole life of this obscure woman. Two days later she gave Lory Susini's message; and de Vasselot sent for the surgeon. "I am going," he said. "Patch me up for a journey." The surgeon had dealt so freely with life and death that he only shrugged his shoulders.
Lory thought of the woman who was leading the Peruccas now, who had quitted the chair in which her accuser now sat, a few minutes earlier, and smiled. "Have you a cigarette?" asked the Corsican, bluntly. "Yes but I cannot offer it to you. It is in my right-hand pocket, and my right arm is disabled."
"So out across the spring lot the three of us went, to the corner where Molly was dozin'. And true for Lory it was, the old lady had fine points; when lightly slapped with Raven's crop she showed spirit and a good bit of action. "'She's sure got a good strain in her, says Raven; 'where did you get her, Lory?
"It is my only chance of making her care for me," he said to himself. He may have been right or wrong. There is a wisdom which is the exclusive possession of the simple. And Lory may have known that it is wiser to store up in a woman's mind memories that will bear honour and respect in the future, than to make appeal to her vanity in the present.
The rides in the Bois de Boulogne are all bordered on either side by thick trees. If Lory de Vasselot pulled across, he would send the maddened Arab into the forest, where the first low branch must of a necessity batter in its rider's head. He rode on, gradually edging across to what in France is the wrong side of the road. "Hold on, madame; hold on," he said, in a quick low voice.
"Do not talk of it," cried the baroness. "It is a horror. I saw Lory, after Woerth, and that was enough war for me. And, figure to yourself! I am all alone in this great house. It is a charity to come and stay with me. Lory has gone to the front. My husband, who said he loved me where is he? Bonjour, and he is gone. He leaves me without a regret.
Lory and Denise were exploring roads which few are called upon to tread dark roads with mud and stones and many turnings, and each has a separate road to tread and must find the way alone. But if Fate is kind they may meet at the end without having gone astray, or, which is rarer, without being spattered by the mud. For those mud-stains will never rub off and never be forgotten.
Then she turned, and her eyes as they met his were stricken with fear. "I did not understand," she said. And she must have been referring to their conversation in that same spot months before. She was either profoundly ignorant of the world or profoundly indifferent to it. She ought, of course, to have made some safe remark about the weather. She ought to have distrusted Lory.
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