A look of pain passed over Guida's face, and she did not reply to his
remark, but turned almost abruptly to the doorway, saying, with just the
slightest hesitation: "You will come in?"

There was no hesitation on his part. "Oui-gia!" he said, and stepped
inside.

She hastily hung up the child's cap and her own, and as she gathered in
the soft, waving hair, Ranulph noticed how the years had only burnished
it more deeply and strengthened the beauty of the head. She had made the
gesture unconsciously, but catching the look in his eye a sudden thrill
of anxiety ran through her. Recovering herself, however, and with an air
of bright friendliness, she laid a hand upon the great arm-chair, above
which hung the ancient sword of her ancestor, the Comte Guilbert Mauprat
de Chambery, and said: "Sit here, Ranulph."

Seating himself he gave a heavy sigh--one of those passing breaths of
content which come to the hardest lives now and then: as though the
Spirit of Life itself, in ironical apology for human existence, gives
moments of respite from which hope is born again. Not for over four long
years had Ranulph sat thus quietly in the presence of Guida. At first,
when Maitresse Aimable had told him that Guida was leaving the Place du
Vier Prison to live in this lonely place with her newborn child, he had
gone to entreat her to remain; but Maitresse Aimable had been present
then, and all that he could say--all that he might speak out of his
friendship, out of the old love, now deep pity and sorrow--was of no
avail. It had been borne in upon him then that she was not morbid, but
that her mind had a sane, fixed purpose which she was intent to fulfil.
It was as though she had made some strange covenant with a little