"He does look sick and worried, ma'am, doesn't he?" agreed the maid.
Twenty-four hours later Frederick and Madelene were settled in a pretty villa nestled at the edge of the forest. Nature in its noblest expression surrounded them. At the going down of the sun, Madelene stood beside her husband on the porch, and pressed her cheek fondly against his shoulder.
"It's so beautiful, isn't it, dear?" she whispered coaxingly.
Out of his wife's words and the gentle gloaming, came a deadly sense of loneliness. A shiver shook Frederick from head to foot. His only answer was an ejaculated affirmative in a hoarse voice. The weird sighing of the trees took him back to Ithaca, back to the ragged rocks ... to Tessibel. For a moment he was so agonized that tears stung his lids to a deep hurt.
If in noisy Paris he had been carried in spirit to the squatter country, where a girl stood and gazed at him with red-brown eyes, how much more did she haunt him in the quiet spot where the leaves sang the same old tunes they sang in her world, where the wind played among them as it did in the Silent City! Now and then from yonder clump of trees a bird twittered; an owl screeched from the tall tree at the right, and farther on a brook chanted its purling song like Tessibel's brook under the mudcellar. Oh, his dear little girl! His Tess of the Storm Country! If in those olden days he had desired her, now that desire was a hundred times more poignant. In all his willful life he had never suffered like this. Tess with her clinging arms, her sweet, winning ways! He sighed a deep, long sigh. Yet soon he would hear something from her. He had written her, ... had sent her money for the necessities of her simple life ... his heart throbbed at the thought of a letter from her.
Madelene's conversation he had not heard, and it was not until she spoke directly to him that he remembered her presence.
"Don't you think so, Fred?" she was asking.
He heaved another sigh as he left Ithaca and came back to France after that flight of fancy.
"Don't I think what? I really didn't hear what you said, Madelene," he admitted guiltily.
Madelene experienced a hot flash of indignation.
"Do you mean to say you've allowed me to talk all this time and you haven't heard a word I've said?" she demanded in a thin, rasping voice.
"I'm sorry," murmured Frederick. "Pardon."
Then the girl lapsed into a sulky silence, and Frederick, too sick at heart, too indifferent to her likes and dislikes to care, did not encourage her to repeat what she had said.