"How foolish!" she murmured. "Why didn't you say so at once?"
"Because," he replied, "they have only been changed during the last few seconds. I wanted to discover something which I have discovered."
"To discover something?"
"That my time has not yet come."
She turned away from him. She was oppressed with a sense almost of fear, a feeling that he was able to read the very thoughts forming in her brain; to understand, as no one else in the world could understand, the things that lived in her heart.
"I must not keep you," he remarked, glancing at the clock. "It was very late for me to call, and you will be wanting to join your friends."
"They are coming here for me," she explained. "There is really no hurry at all. We are not changing anything. It is to be quite a simple evening. Sometimes I wish that you cared about things of that sort, Eugène."
He blew through his lips a little cloud of smoke from the cigarette which he had just lit.
"I do not fancy," he replied, "that I should be much of a success as a fourth in your little expedition."
"But it is silly of you not to visit Bohemia occasionally," she declared, ignoring the meaning that lay beneath his words. "It is refreshing to rub shoulders with people who feel, and who show freely what they feel; to eat their food, drink their wine, even join in their pleasures."