"You dare not," the darkness sighed.
Sylvia crept out of bed and, bending over the governess, waked her with soft reassurances, as one wakes a child.
"Forgive me," she whispered, "for the way I spoke. But, oh, do believe me when I tell you that love like that is terrible. I understand the dullness of your profession, and if you like I will take you with me on my gipsy life when we leave the hospital. You can amuse yourself with seeing the world; but if you want love, you must demand it with your head high. Every little governess who behaves like you creates another harlot."
"Did you wake me up to insult me?" demanded Miss Savage.
"No, my dear, you don't understand me. I'm not thinking of what you make yourself. You will pay for that. I'm thinking of some baby now at its mother's breast, for whose damnation you will be responsible by giving another proof to man of woman's weakness, by having kindled in him another lust."
"I think you'd do better to bother about your own soul instead of mine," said Miss Savage. "Please let me go to sleep again. When I wanted to talk, you pretended to be shocked. I asked you if you were a Catholic, and you told me you were nothing. I particularly avoided hurting your susceptibilities. The least you can do is to be polite in return."
Sylvia went back to bed, and, thinking over what the governess had said, decided that, after all, she was right: she ought to bother with her own soul first.
Three weeks later Sylvia was told that she was now fit to leave the hospital. The nuns charged her very little for their care; but when she walked out of the door she had only about eighty rubles in the world. With rather a heavy heart she drove to Mère Gontran's pension.
CHAPTER II
THE pension was strangely silent when Sylvia returned to it; the panic of war had stripped it bare of guests. Although she had known that Carrier and the English acrobats were gone and had more or less made up her mind that most of the girls would also be gone, this complete abandonment was tristful. Mère Gontran's influence had always pervaded the pension; even before her illness Sylvia had been affected by that odd personality and had often been haunted by the unusualness of the whole place; but the disconcerting atmosphere had always been quickly and easily neutralized by the jolly mountebanks and Bohemians with whose point of view and jokes and noise she had been familiar all her life. Sylvia and the other guests had so often laughed together at Mère Gontran's eccentricity, at the tumble-down house, at the tangled garden, at the muttering handmaid, and at the animals in the kitchen, that through their careless merriment the pension had come to be no more than one of the incidents of the career they followed, something to talk of when they swirled on and lodged in another corner of the earth's surface. There would be no city in Europe at which in some cabaret one would not find a copain with whom to laugh over the remembrance of Mère Gontran's talking collie. But how many of these gay mountebanks dispersed by the panic of war would not have been affected by the Pension Gontran, had they returned to it like this, alone?