Then, she looked up again.
“But I want you to stay. I want you to do everything you can for both of them.” She paused, and her next words were spoken with an effort: “And I don’t want—I don’t want you to speak of me. I don’t want you to try to remind him.”
“He will question me,” demurred Steele.
Duska’s head was raised with a little gesture of pride.
“I am not afraid,” she said, “that he will ask you anything he should not—anything that he has not the right to ask.”
CHAPTER XX
When he turned back, a day later, from the turmoil of the station, from the strenuous labor of weighing trunks, locating the compartment in the train, subsidizing the guards, and, hardest of all, saying good-bye to Duska with a seeming or normal cheerfulness, Steele found himself irritably out of measure with the quick-step of Paris. Mrs. Horton and the girl were on their way to the Riviera. He was left behind to watch results; almost, it seemed to him, to sit by and observe the post-mortem on every hope in the lives of three people. Nice should still be quiet. The tidal wave of “trippers” would not for a little while sweep over its rose-covered slopes and white beaches and dazzling esplanades, and the place would afford the girl at least every soothing influence that nature could offer. That would not be much, but it would be something.
As for himself, he felt the isolation of Paris. On a desert, a man may become lonely; in deep forests and on high mountains, he may come to know and hate his own soul in solitude, but the last note of aloofness, of utter exile, is that which comes to him who looks vainly for one face in a sea of other faces, whose small cosmos lies in unwept and unnoticed ruin in the midst of a giant city that moves along its indifferent way to the time of dance-music. In the hotel, there was the chatter of tourists. His own tongue was prattled by men and women whose lives seemed to revolve around the shops of the Rue de la Paix, or whose literature was the information of the guide-books. He felt that everyone was invading his somberness of mood with trivialities, until, in revulsion against the whole stage-setting of things, he had himself and his luggage transported to the Hôtel Voltaire, where the life about him was the simpler life of the less pretentious quais of the Seine.