Temper

But his new mood veiled she knew not what. It seemed, if she
comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful
vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit. Before it her
heart became as water. Even her colour little by little left her cheeks.
She knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it
was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now
guiltily sought and now avoided his. And feeling sure that he did read
it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which
plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her
perplexity.

This, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful
thoughts. On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in
steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent. On the other
the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-
deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. Again the
travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through
the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last
year's leaves. And out again and down again they passed, and turning
aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall
of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces
half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through
the glare and heat. Down to the river-level again, where a squalid
anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them,
and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the
hour of Nones.