"I am not often so foolish," she murmured. "Once—let me tell you this—once I had a dear little friend. She was very sweet, but a little too trusting, too simple for the life here. She found a lover. She thought she had found the happiness of her life. Poor child! For a month, perhaps, she was happy. Then he forced her to give up her little home and her savings and go upon the stage. He preferred a mistress from the theatres. She worked hard, but, sweetly pretty though she was, she was not very successful. Then she caught cold. She began to lose her health—and she lost her lover."
"Brute!"
"The child got worse," madame went on. "Presently they told her that it was consumption. She went to a hospital and she wrote a pathetic little note to the man. He tore it up. There had been an article in the papers a few weeks before proving that consumption was among the diseases which were more or less infectious. He sent her a few brutal lines and a trifle of money, with a warning that there was to be no more. He never went to see her. The child grew worse. I used to sit with her sometimes. I saw her look down upon the river, almost as we are looking now, and her eyes would grow soft and wet with tears, and she would tell me in whispers of the evenings she had spent with him, when the love had first come, and how sweet and tender he was. There must be something wrong, she was sure. He did not understand, he could not know how ill she really was. She prayed for the sight of him. I put her off with one excuse after another, but one day the fear of death was in her eyes, the terror came to her, she was afraid. She was afraid of dying alone, of going into a strange country, no one to hold her. I went to the man, I begged him to come and see her. He scoffed at me. If she had consumption, she was better dead. He would have flirted with me if I had let him. I can hear his voice now—brutal, jeering, hideous! It was the voice, Sir Julien, which we heard ten minutes ago at the next table. Do you wonder that I hate it?"
"And the little girl?" he asked.
"When I returned without him," she answered, "the little girl was dead."
They were both silent, listening to the splash of the water and to the distant music.
"Life is like that," she went on. "We pass through it lightly enough, but Heaven only knows the number of little tragedies against which our skirts must brush. Sometimes they leave impressions, sometimes we grow callous, but the horror of that man's voice will stay with me always…. Shall we go back now? You would like your coffee."
"Sit here for five minutes more," he begged. "Tell me, did you know that the man was a spy?"
She looked at him curiously.
"How is it that you know so much about him?"