I mustn’t try to bend and keep this lovely time. I must let it fly—and bless it as it goes. And so it will bless me.”
She seldom made quotations nowadays. For this one he felt a gratitude such as his life had rarely known.
“It’s been a joy to you, too, then?”
“Of course it has,” said Adrienne smiling at him and turning at last towards the bridge that they must cross. “It’s been one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me.”
CHAPTER VIII
OLDMEADOW sat at the inlaid table in the gilded salon on the afternoon of the last day. He had two letters to write, for, as he had put off speaking to Adrienne till their last evening, so he had put off writing to Barney and to Lydia Aldesey till this last afternoon, and he saw now how difficult it would be to write coherently while his thoughts stretched themselves forward to those few hours of the night when his fate would be decided.
Adrienne had gone out. She had written her short communication to Barney and brought it in with its envelope and laid it before him, asking him in the voice that, again, made him think of snow: “Is that quite right?”
It was, quite, he told her, after glancing through it swiftly. It stated, in the most colourless terms, the facts that Barney was to take to his solicitor. “Quite right,” he repeated, looking up at her. “Are you going out? Will you post it?—or shall I?”
“Will you post it with yours? Yes. I must go out. But I’ll try to be back by tea-time. It’s very disappointing; our last afternoon. But that poor woman from Roubaix—the one with consumption up at the Croix Rousse—is dying. They’ve sent for me. All the little children, you remember I told you. I’m going to wire to Joséphine and ask her if she can come down and look after them for a little while.”
“Joséphine?” he questioned. He had, till now, entirely forgotten Joséphine. Adrienne told him that she was with her parents in a provincial town. “They lost their only son and are very sad. Fine, brave old people. He is a baker, the old father, and makes the most wonderful bread. I went to see them last summer.”