“Give it up then,” said Oldmeadow. And if he had found it difficult to make his plea for Barney a little while before, how much more difficult he found it to say this, and to mean it, now. “Give it up. That’s your choice, and your only choice. You owe that to me. Indeed you do. To give it up or to accept me as your companion in iniquity. I’m not going to pretend I don’t think it iniquity to give you ease. You’re not a person who needs ease. And I can do without it, too. For your sake. So there you have it.”
“Not quite. Not quite,” she really almost pleaded. “I couldn’t ask it of Hamilton if he felt about it in the least little way as you do. And Carola doesn’t care a bit about the law either. She’s an Imagist, you know.”—Adrienne offered this fact as if it would help to elucidate Carola’s complaisances. “She’s written some very original poetry. If it were Hamilton no one would lose anything, and Barney and Nancy would be free. Indeed, indeed I can’t give it up when it’s all there, before me, with everything to gain and nothing to lose for anybody, if it’s Hamilton.”
“Then it must be me, you see,” said Oldmeadow. “And I shan’t talk to you about the iniquity again, I promise you. I’ve made my protest and civilization must get on as best it can. You’re a terrible person, you know”—he smiled a little at her, finding the banter so that she should not guess at the commotion of his heart. “But I like you just as you are. Now where shall we go?”
CHAPTER VII
HE could not have believed that it would be so delicious to live with Adrienne Toner.
Even at the moment when he had known that he loved her, he had been, though filled with the sense of a present heaven, as aware as ever of the discrepancies between them, and during the three months that separated them, he at Cannes, she nursing in Paris, he knew many doubts; never of his love, but of what it was making him do and of where it was going to lead them. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what was to become of them if his hopes were fulfilled, for he hardly saw himself following her off to Central Europe—it was to Serbia, her letters informed him, that her thoughts were turning—nor saw them established in London under the astonished gaze of Lydia Aldesey.
She had selected Lyons as their place of meeting, because of the work for the rapatriés that she wished to inspect there, and from the moment that he saw her descend from the Paris express, dressed in dark civilian clothes and carrying, with such an air of competence, her rug and dressing-case, all doubts were allayed and all restlessness dispelled.
He had arrived the day before and had found an old-fashioned hotel with spacious rooms overlooking the Saône, and, as they drove to it on that November evening, she expressed herself, scrutinizing him with a professional eye, as dissatisfied with his recovery.
It was because of the restlessness, of course, that he had not got as well as he should have, and he knew that he must, in the stress of feeling that now beset him, look strangely, and he promised her, feeling that he spoke the truth, that now that he had his nurse again complete recovery would be only a matter of days.
“I want you to see our view,” he said to her when the porter had carried up her little box and they were left alone in the brocaded and gilded salon that separated their rooms; “I chose this place for the view; it’s the loveliest in Lyons, I think.”