"Why, what a pig I've been, Anne!" he exclaimed, glancing from the table to the clock. "You must have been writing for nearly three hours!"
She was busy picking up the sheets.
"Quite, I should say," she answered, "but I loved it. Now I am going to ring for tea, and afterwards you must read it through. We might get the manuscript down to the office to-night."
"I shall need you when I read it through," he reminded her. "There will be corrections."
"Either Madame Christophor or I will be here," she replied. "Madame
Christophor may have some other work for me."
He looked at her curiously.
"Even you are different," he murmured.
"Tell me at once what you mean?" she begged.
"I wish I knew," he confessed. "To tell you the truth, Anne, a curious feeling of detachment seems to have come over me—during the last few days especially. It is such a short time since I was living the ordinary sort of mechanical life in London, engaged to be married to you, and my doings day by day all mapped out—a life interesting, of course, but without any real variation. And now here I am, hanging on to life by the thin edge of nothing, writing such things as I should never have dared to have said from my seat in the House, practically an adventurer. Do you wonder that sometimes I am not quite sure that it isn't all a nightmare? I am actually hiding here in Paris from assassins—in Paris, the most civilized city in the world—the guest of a woman whose acquaintance I made only because a little manicurist in Soho insisted upon it. And you, Anne, are here by my side, a professional secretary, the friend of a milliner, more intimate and on better terms with me than you were in the days when we were engaged to be married! What has happened to us, Anne? How did we get here?"
She laughed at him tolerantly.