"Yes," she said.
"The reason he has got ALL he wanted—whatever he wanted—is that he will go to any length. Every other human being, almost, has a limit, beyond which they will not go—a physical fear or a moral fear or a fear of public opinion. But the general—he has no limit."
"Yes," she said. And deathly pale and almost staggering she drew open the door and went out into the public hall.
"For God's sake, Mrs. Siddall!" cried Harding, in great agitation. "Come in quickly. They are watching—they will tell him! Are you mad?"
"I think I must be," said she. "I am sick with fear. I can hardly keep from dropping down here in a faint. Yet—" a strange look, a mingling of abject terror and passionate defiance, gave her an aspect quite insane—"I am going. Perhaps I, too, have no limit."
And she went along the corridor, past a group of gaping and frightened servants, down the stairway and out by the private entrance for the grand apartments of the hotel in the Rue Raymond de l'Isle. She crossed the Rue de Rivoli and entered the Tuileries Gardens. It was only bracingly cool in the sunshine of that winter day. She seated herself on a chair on the terrace to regain her ebbed strength. Hardly had she sat down when the woman collector came and stood waiting for the two sous for the chair. Mildred opened her bag, found two coins. She gave the coppers to the woman. The other—all the money she had—was the fifty-centime piece.
"But the bag—I can get a good deal for that," she said aloud.
"I beg your pardon—I didn't catch that."
She came back to a sense of her surroundings. Stanley Baird was standing a few feet away, smiling down at her. He was, if possible, even more attractively dressed than in the days when he hovered about her, hoping vague things of which he was ashamed and trying to get the courage to put down his snobbishness and marry her because she so exactly suited him. He was wearing a new kind of collar and tie, striking yet in excellent quiet taste. Also, his face and figure had filled out just enough—he had been too thin in the former days. But he was now entered upon that period of the fearsome forties when, unless a man amounts to something, he begins to look insignificant. He did not amount to anything; he was therefore paling and waning as a personality.
"Was I thinking aloud?" said Mildred, as she gave him her hand.