“I must go,” she said to herself. “Why does she look at me as if she felt contempt for me?” But it seemed impossible to go after that look without an explanation. The memory of that expression would haunt her.
She looked up and saw that Richard had come back from the door, and that a workman had followed him, and together they crossed the studio and disappeared into the little room at the back.
Anne sat and sipped her tea, tortured by the need to speak, to ask a question, to see light, and by the desire to escape, to go out of the studio and never to set foot in it again. But she could not find the words with which to ask her question or to take her leave, and she sat on, dumbly watching the workman crossing the room, first with a rolled-up mattress in his arms and then with a little folding bed or carrying a wash-hand-stand. Richard came back and threw himself down in a chair. There was a silence, prolonged until the workman reappeared, crossed the studio and went out once more with a chair and a looking-glass.
Ginette gave Richard an appealing look and he said:
“Anne, I think perhaps you had better go now. Ginette and I are both rather upset.” He paused for a moment and said in colourless tones: “Besides, someone who wishes to see you is waiting.”
Anne rose. “Good-bye, Mademoiselle Lariboisière,” she said, holding out her hand. The brown hand gripped hers firmly.
“Till we meet again,” she said, and then added in broken English: “You have a lucky face.”
“Thank you for telling me about the swallows,” said Richard as he stood above her at the top of the stairs.
The French workman was struggling with a small table on the staircase and it was some moments before she could reach the street.
“Never to know the meaning! Never to learn the secret! Never to understand anything at all!” Anne cried with tears coming into her eyes. “I have never seen into another person’s heart. I never shall. Wherever I am, my curse clings to me!” A vague project of suicide, of being found floating in the river, passed through her mind as she stepped out into the street. The workman was still in front of her lifting the table into a small motor-van; in avoiding him she ran into Grandison’s back.