“I will come to you soon. Good-bye.”
And so Hilda was driven away.
It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is lying down. She seemed ill. “Et bien malade même,” and had said that she wanted no dinner.
“I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I think,” said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost immediately.
She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, beyond all wish for it. The afternoon’s unpleasantness had been merely the last straw. The long endurance of the past month—the past months indeed—that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on pity—was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes.
He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden horrible weakness almost overcame him.
“Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the fiery jeune premier to such an extent this afternoon that dramatic restlessness is in keeping.”
Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns up and down the room.
“You look so badly,” he said, pausing before her; “how do you feel?”
“Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself.” Hilda tried to smile, stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. “I feel weak and foolish,” she added, clasping her hands on her knee.