Etta, on the bed, nursed her knee. Her fair hair fell in a mass about her shoulders. She looked the picture of innocence—a female child Samuel out of an illustrated Family Bible. “The sight of you, darling, at Lyons Station.” “Little liar!” murmured Clementina. But she forebore to question the girl further. She had no intention of supplying the necessary shock above mentioned. The observance of the gradual absorption of these two young souls one in the other was far too delicious an agony to be wantonly broken. Besides, it hardened her nature (so she fondly imagined), dried up the newly found well-head of passion, reduced the soft full woman back to the stony-hearted; wooden-faced, bitter-tongued, cynical, portrait-painting automaton, the enviable, self-mutilated Clementina of a few months ago. When a woman wants to punish herself she does so conscientiously. The offending Eve should be thoroughly whipped out of her. The car of thirty-five million dove-power sped through the highways of sunny France—through enchanted forest glades, over mountains of the moon; through cities of wonderland, so, at least, it seemed to two young souls. For Clementina, alas, the glamour of sky and sunshine and greenery had departed. For Johnson, happy possessor of a carburation in lieu of a temperament it had never existed. From Valence they struck north-west, though St. Etienne, Roanne, Nevers, Bourges. It was at Bourges that she came upon the two young people unawares. She had entered, not knowing where they were, for they had gone off together, the cloistered courtyard of the Hôtel de Jacques Cœur. Now the cloister forms an arcaded gallery a few feet above the ground, which is reached by a flight of steps. She heard voices, approached hidden from them, beheld the pair sitting on the bottom step, in the cool shadow. “I should never get the whole adorableness of this,” said Tommy, “if I hadn’t you beside me. You and I seem to be like the two barrels of a field-glass—adjusted to one focus.” Clementina, hugging the wall, tip-toed out of the cloister. There was only one alternative, a whirlwind, a hurricane of a temptation which she was strong enough to resist: to descend then and there and box his ears soundly. CHAPTER XII