"Then there is no hope for me, Emmeline?"
She looked at me vaguely, absently, without speaking, and shook her head. Her lustrous eyes filled with tears.
CHAPTER XIX
THE INTERCESSION
Just as I was walking away from the hotel I perceived Rosa's victoria drawing up before the portico. She saw me. We exchanged a long look—a look charged with anxious questionings. Then she beckoned to me, and I, as it were suddenly waking from a trance, raised my hat, and went to her.
"Get in," she said, without further greeting. "We will drive to the Arc de Triomphe and back. I was going to call on Mrs. Sullivan Smith,—just a visit of etiquette,—but I will postpone that."
Her manner was constrained, as it had been on the previous day, but I could see that she was striving hard to be natural. For myself, I did not speak. I felt nervous, even irritable, in my love for her. Gradually, however, her presence soothed me, slackened the tension of my system, and I was able to find a faint pleasure in the beauty of the September afternoon, and of the girl by my side, in the smooth movement of the carriage, and the general gaiety and color of the broad tree-lined Champs Elysées.
"Why do you ask me to drive with you?" I asked her at length, abruptly yet suavely. Amid the noise of the traffic we could converse with the utmost privacy.