Laurent jumped up and held out his hands to the ghost.
"Aymar, if you blame me——"
"Blame you? how could you think such a thing! Don't I know that you would make out a case for me a thousand times better than I could myself, and that you would do it so that it must be believed—if any truth in this world is to be believed! And that is just why . . . Never mind. Why talk of it to-night? Let us go to bed."
But Laurent had laid hold of him. "Aymar—I'm so stupid—for pity's sake tell me what you mean!"
"Why," answered Aymar, very quietly standing still in his grip, "just this: she understands now . . . and it has made no difference."
Laurent loosed him, aghast. By telling him what he had done he had taken away his friend's last hope. He dropped back on to the window-seat.
Aymar sat down there, too, and leant his head against a mullion. "You see," he said evenly, "that this is a just inference, for she has had plenty of time to write to me, even if it were only to wish me good success . . . and I have not had a word. She cannot be ill, or my grandmother would have mentioned it. So it is not my ineradicable pride as you call it, Laurent. I am certain that you put things better for me than I could ever have done myself. Another debt—the deepest, it might have been, of all I owe you. But it only shows that she has washed her hands of me. I dare say she has cause."
The moonlight enshrined the two silent figures. Aymar had his chin cupped on his hand as he looked out of the window into the warm night. But before Laurent's eyes was the rose-garden at Sessignes, the little white-clad figure, the misty eyes, the trembling voice. . . . Yet nothing had come of that emotion, after all.
Aymar turned at last and put a hand on his. "My dear Laurent, one cannot have everything. Don't, don't look like that! It is not for me to show myself ungrateful for this wonderful day. I don't think that I quite realize myself yet that I am no longer an outcast, and that must be my excuse."
Laurent gripped the hand very hard. "I knew the luck would turn," he observed rather huskily. "No one could go on having such appalling bad fortune as you since you lost the jartier."