"I'll remember always." She stood up and held out her hand. He took it in his, and shook it heartily. His manner was so quiet, so commonplace, his face and voice so calm, that she could hardly believe that he really cared, that he really "minded much," as she put it to herself. Can a man shake hands like that with a woman, she wondered, if he is broken-hearted because she has refused him?
"Now we must go," she said. "I—shouldn't like to be late for my appointment."
"You shan't be late," he assured her, cheerfully. Then, just as they were moving away from the table, he stopped. "Will you give me one of those roses," he asked, "to keep for a souvenir?"
Their waiter had adorned the little feast with a glass containing a few short-stemmed roses. Mary selected the prettiest, a white one just unfolding from the bud, and gave it to Captain Hannaford. So quickly that no one saw, he laid it against her faintly smiling lips, then hid it inside his coat.
When the taxi had rushed up the upper Corniche and had taken the carriage road to Roquebrune, Mary said goodbye to Hannaford in the Place under the great wall of the old castle. She guessed that, perhaps, he would have liked an invitation to go with her to the curé's garden, which he had never seen. But she did not give the invitation. She even lingered, so that he must have seen she wished him to drive away; and he took the hint, if it were a hint, at once.
"Goodbye," he said, pleasantly. "Thank you a thousand times, for everything."
"But it's I who have to thank you!" she protested.
"If I could think you would ever feel like thanking me for anything, I should be glad."
He released her hand, after pressing it once very hard; got into the taxi, gave the chauffeur the name of his hotel in the Condamine, and was whirled away. The last that Mary saw of him he was looking back, waving his hat as if he were saying goodbye for a long, long time.