Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.
"Good-bye, old chap," she said, "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you!"
But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently.
"Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you—never, never in my life."
Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.
And now we are getting nearer the episode. Paris bored Paul—he did not know its joys and was in no mood to learn them. He mooned about and went to the races. His French was too indifferent to make theatres a pleasure, and the attractive ladies who smiled at his blue eyes were for him défendues. A man so recently parted from the only woman he could ever love had no right to look at such things, he thought. How young and chivalrous and honest he was—poor Paul!
So he took to visiting Versailles and Fontainebleau and Compiègne with a guide-book, and came to the conclusion it was all "beastly rot."
So he turned his back upon France and fled to Switzerland.
Do you know Switzerland?—you who read. Do you know it at the beginning of May? A feast of blue lakes, and snow-peaks, and the divinest green of young beeches, and the sombre shadow of dark firs, and the exhilaration of the air.
If you do, I need not tell you about it. Only in any case now, you must see it through the eyes of Paul. That is if you intend to read another page of this bad book.