The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

“Good-by, mignonne....”

For a moment she clung to him, the fear that was upon her manifest in the trembling of her little body. “Not good-by,” she said. “We must not say good-by.”

“Four days from to-day—without fail.”

“I shall not fail—I shall come, certainement.”

Again their lips met. “Now you must go,” he said, and she turned away slowly and walked in that dainty way of hers toward the entrance to the Metro. He stood watching her, expecting her to turn back, but she did not turn back.... In a moment she disappeared down the stairs. He was miserable....

But he did not understand—or if he did understand he hid the truth from himself—what this parting on this evening was to Andree.... Last night she had confessed that she loved him, and had made him a promise, a promise that he half understood, but which he pretended to himself he did not understand at all.... Perhaps he did not really grasp the extent of her surrender, for young men, American young men of such upbringing as his, and such code of ethics as he knew, are not equipped to understand—and sometimes nature has made them very dull.... He had drifted along with Andree until he was beyond his depth. To drift had been so easy, for his heart had told him Andree was good—was nice.... Now he hid from himself that he was apprehensive of what might come, just as he tried to hide from himself that his own viewpoint was changed, and that a thing which had seemed very wrong and squalid and unthinkable was not, perhaps, so evil as his mother might assert.

At any rate, he had arrived at this point—he would not draw back. Andree was good, and he loved and respected Andree. And ... it was very confusing ... he was young and decent and as clean of mind as a man may be.... But—he was seeing and learning. Plymouth Rock could not legislate for the world nor impose its prudery and falsity—a prudery and falsity that made it a punishable offense for a husband to kiss his wife on the Sabbath day—upon an older world well able to legislate for itself. America was America. Well and good! Let America live according to the code it had chosen.... France was France. Who, save only Deity Itself, could assert that France was less virtuous, less in accord with the wishes of the Supreme Composer of Ethical Systems, because the ethics of France were not the ethics of Plymouth, Massachusetts, or of Detroit, Michigan?

But Kendall did not realize—how could he realize it?—that to Andree, after her promise of the night before, this parting had been in all its essentials as if she had been deserted upon her bridal night....

CHAPTER X

It was nearly eleven o’clock when Kendall and his companions arrived in the old cathedral town of Meaux and found accommodations in the Hôtel Sirène, that rather quaint and down-at-heel hostelry which hides in a courtyard behind huge gates that close at an hour so early as to astonish Americans. Kendall was to discover that this was the universal custom in the smaller towns of the country—that the hotels closed themselves to guests in the early evening, and that to effect an entrance thereafter was an achievement.