her
tear-stained cheeks on the neck of Jack's horse.

XII

FROM THE FRONTIER

During the next three days, for the first time since he had known
her, he did not go to see Lorraine. How he stood it--how he ever
dragged through those miserable hours--he himself never could
understand.

The wide sculptured eyes of Our Lady of Morteyn above the shrine
seemed to soften when he went there to sit at her feet and stare
at nothing. It was not tears, but dew, that gathered under the
stone lids, for the night had grown suddenly hot, and everything
lay moist in the starlight. Night changed to midnight, and
midnight to dawn, and dawn to another day, cloudless, pitiless;
and Jack awoke again, and his waking thought was of Lorraine.

All day long he sat with the old vicomte, reading to him when he
wished, playing interminable games of chess, sick at heart with a
longing that almost amounted to anger. He could not tell his
aunt. As far as that went, the wise old lady had divined that
their first trouble had come to them in all the appalling and
exaggerated proportions that such troubles assume, but she smiled
gently to herself, for she, too, had been young, and the ways of
lovers had been her ways, and the paths of love she had trodden,
and she had drained love's cup at bitter springs.

That night she came to his bedside and kissed him, saying:
"To-morrow you shall carry my love and my thanks to Lorraine for
her care of the horse."

"I can't," muttered Jack.

"Pooh!" said Madame de Morteyn, and closed the bedroom door; and
Jack slept better that night.

It was ten o'clock the next morning before he appeared at
breakfast, and it was plain, even to the thrush on the lawn
outside, that he had bestowed an elaboration upon his toilet that
suggested either a duel or a wedding.

Madame de Morteyn hid her face, for she could not repress the
smile that tormented her sweet mouth. Even the vicomte said: "Oh!
You're not off for Paris, Jack, are you?"

After breakfast he wandered moodily out to the terrace, where his
aunt found him half an hour later, mooning and contemplating his
spotless gloves.

"Then you are not going to ride over to the Chateau de Nesville?"
she asked, trying not to laugh.

"Oh!" he said, with affected surprise, "did you wish me to go to
the Chateau?"

"Yes, Jack dear, if you are not too much occupied." She could not
repress the mischievous accent on the "too." "Are you going to
drive?"

"No; I