He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States. A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents, had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New York in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should catch the Touraine at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should not travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
I smiled proudly.
‘I am both sad and happy,’ I answered.
He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck, and brought my face close to his.
‘Look at me,’ he said.
And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
‘You mustn’t think,’ he whispered, ‘that, because I don’t talk about it, I don’t feel that I owe everything to you.’
I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
‘My poor boy,’ I sobbed, ‘if you talk about that I shall never forgive you.’
It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than I was then.