“Why not?” Damier inquired, surprised, and conscious in his surprise of a quick hostility to Claire and to her smiling look of dexterous evasion.
“He hasn’t seen us—come,” she insisted, though the insistence was still veiled in humor.
“Why should he not see us? I shall be glad to see him.”
Her eyes measured Monsieur Daunay’s distance before she said, with something of impatience at his slowness of comprehension: “He will be shocked—think it improper—our walking out alone like this.” Damier stared at her, stolidly resistant to the soft pull of her hand.
“Improper? Your mother consenting—you an Englishwoman, I an Englishman?”
“He is a Frenchman, and I am half French; you seem to forget that, both you and Mamma, at times.” If she was irritated with him she successfully controlled her irritation, and Monsieur Daunay was so near that flight before his misinterpretation was impossible. She evidently resigned herself to the situation of Damier’s making—let him feel, with a shrug of her shoulders, that it was of his making indeed, but, by a half-indifferent, half-ironic smile, that he was forgiven; he must be strong enough for both of them, the smile said.
Monsieur Daunay approached, doffing his hat, and Damier at once perceived that there was certainly in his eye a cogitation very courteous, but altogether out of keeping, he thought, with the importance of its cause. He himself felt absent-minded, his thoughts engaged more with the analysis of the new and disagreeable sensation Claire had given him than with the sensations she might have given Monsieur Daunay. He replied somewhat vaguely to Monsieur Daunay’s salutations, and, not so vaguely, heard Claire saying, “Mamma has sent us out for a walk.”
“Fine weather for walking,” Monsieur Daunay replied, looking away from the young woman up at the vivid spring sky and round at the expansive day, all wind, sunlight, and sauntering groups of people.
“You often walk here?” he continued pleasantly.
“Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr. Damier takes us out sometimes.”