On this occasion it was not long before he showed his other face. The Abbess, after waiting without and fretting much--for she had returned to the purpose momentarily abandoned, and the length of the interview alarmed her--won entrance at last. She exchanged a cold greeting with the departing Lieutenant, then took his place, book in hand, on the green bench. For a while there was silence. She had so far played her part with success. The Duke knew not whether to call her saint or woman; and that he might remain in that doubt she now left it to him to speak. At the same time she left him at liberty to look: for she knew that bending thus at her devotions she must appear more striking to his jaded senses. And he, for a time, was mute also, and thoughtful; so much he gave to the scene just ended. It is possible that the silence was prolonged by the chance of considering her at leisure which she was careful to afford him. He was still weak, the better side of him was still uppermost; and handsome as she was, he saw her through a medium of his own, in a halo of meekness and goodness and purity. Thus viewed she fell in with his higher mood, she was a part of it, she prolonged it. A time would come, would most certainly come, when one of the wildest libertines of his day would see her otherwise, and in the woman forget the saint. But it had not yet come. And the Abbess, with her pure, cold profile, bent over her book, and, with her thoughts apparently in heaven, knew also that her time had not yet come. Though her face betrayed nothing, she was in an angry mood. She had gained little by the altercation with des Ageaux; and though the simplicity which he had betrayed in his dealings with the peasants excited her boundless contempt--he, to pit himself against M. de Vlaye!--the peril which it brought upon all heightened that contempt to anger. If the peril had been his only, or included the Countess only, if it had threatened those only whom she could so well spare, and towards whose undoing her brain was busily working, she could have borne it bravely and gaily. But the case was far other; and something she regretted that she had not bowed to her first impulse in the chapel and called to M. de Vlaye, and gone to him--ay, gone to him empty-handed as she was, without the triumph of which she had dreamed. For the jeopardy in which she and all her family now stood put her in a dilemma. If the Lieutenant kept faith with the peasants and all went well, it would go ill with her lover. If, on the contrary, M. des Ageaux failed to restrain the peasants, it might go ill with herself.