I
drew aside that she might pass; and this she did with her chin in
the air, and her petticoat drawn to her that it might not touch me.
I would have spoken to her, but her eyes looked straight before her
with a glance that was too forbidding; besides which there was the
gaze of a half-dozen grooms upon us. So, bowing before her - the
plume of my doffed hat sweeping the ground - I let her go. Yet I
remained standing where she had passed me, and watched her enter
the coach. I looked after the vehicle as it wheeled round and
rattled out over the drawbridge, to raise a cloud of dust on the
white, dry road beyond.
In that hour I experienced a sense of desolation and a pain to which
I find it difficult to give expression. It seemed to me as if she
had gone out of my life for all time - as if no reparation that I
could ever make would suffice to win her back after what had passed
between us that morning. Already wounded in her pride by what
Mademoiselle de Marsac had told her of our relations, my behaviour
in the rose garden had completed the work of turning into hatred
the tender feelings that but yesterday she had all but confessed
for me. That she hated me now, I was well assured. My reflections
as I walked had borne it in upon me how rash, how mad had been my
desperate action, and with bitterness I realized that I had destroyed
the last chance of ever mending matters.
Not even the payment of my wager and my return in my true character
could avail me now.
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