d of old
Enguerrande de Beauvais, his ancestor, dust these four hundred years at
"Damietta of the South," raced in him, and he choked with rage and
grief, and for the time could scarcely see. Yet with this pulse of wrath
were mingled delicious thrills. The tear which she did not hide from
him was his gage of love. The brooding eye, the infrequent smile, the
start, the reverie were for him only, and for no other. They were the
gift to him of her secret life, her inmost heart.

It was an odd love-making, and bizarre. To Grio, even to men more
delicate and more finely wrought, it might have seemed no love-making at
all. But the wood-smoke that perfumed the air, sweetened it, the
firelight wrapped it about, the pots and pans and simple things of life,
amid which it passed, hallowed it. His eyes attending her hither and
thither without reserve, without concealment, unabashed, laid his heart
at her feet, not once, but a hundred times in the evening; and as often,
her endurance of the look, more rarely her sudden blush or smile,
accepted the offering.

And scarce a word said: for though they had the room to themselves, they
knew that they were never alone or unheeded. Basterga, indeed, sat above
stairs and only descended to his meals; and Grio also was above when he
was not at the tavern. But Louis sulked in his closet beside them,
divided from them only by a door, whence he might emerge at any minute.
As a fact he would have emerged many times, but for two things. The
first was his marked face, which he was chary of showing; the second,
the notion which he had got that the balance of things in the house was
changing, and the reign of petty bullying, in which he had so much
delighted, approaching its end. With Basterga exposed to arrest, and the
girl's help become of value to the authorities, it needed little acumen
to discern this. He still feared Basterga; nay, he lived in such terror,
lest the part he had played should come to the scholar's ears, that he
prayed for his arrest night and morning, and whenever during the day an
especial fit of dread seized him. But he feared Anne also, for she might
betray him to Basterga; and of young Mercier's quality--that he was no
Tissot to be brow-beaten, or thrust aside--he had had proof on the night
of the fracas at supper. Essentially a coward, Louis' aim was to be on
the stronger side; and once persuaded that this was the side on which
they stood, he let them be.

On several conse