"Eugène," she expostulated, "we are too old friends to talk always in veiled phrases. There is something you have to say to me. I am listening."
"You know what it is," he told her.
"You are displeased because I have changed my mind about that little journey of ours?"
"I am bitterly disappointed," he admitted.
She looked at him curiously and then down at her rose-stained fingers.
"That does not sound quite like you," she said. "And yet I ought to know that sometimes you do feel things, even though you show it so little. I am sorry, Eugène."
"Why are you sorry?"
"Because I feel that I cannot take that journey."
"You mean that you cannot now, or that you cannot at any time?"
"I do not know," she answered. "You ask me more than I can tell you. Sometimes life seems so stable, a thing one can make a little chart of and hang up on the wall, and put one's finger here and there—'To-day I will do this, to-morrow I will feel that'—and the next morning comes and the chart is in the fire. I wish I understood myself a little better, Eugène!"