He held out his hand, but without taking it, she stood motionless while she looked at him with her unchanging smile.
"Then I'll let it be good-bye," she answered, "but not this way—not just like this—"
Her voice mocked him; and moved by an impulse which was half daring, half vanity, he closed the door again and came back to where she stood.
"So long as it's good-bye, I'll have it any way you wish," he said.
CHAPTER VIII
SHOWS THAT LOVE WITHOUT WISDOM IS FOLLY
The odd part was, he admitted next morning as he sat at breakfast, that from first to last he had not found one moment's pleasure in the society of Madame Alta. Pleasure in a suitable quantity he was inclined to regard as sufficient excuse for the most serious indiscretion; but in this case the temptation to which he had yielded appeared to him, by the light of day, to be entirely out of proportion to any actual enjoyment he had experienced. An impulse which was neither vanity nor daring, but a mixture of the two, had swept away his resolve before he was clearly aware, as he expressed it, "of the drift of the wind." He had not wanted to go with her and yet he had gone, impelled by some fury of adventure which had seemed all the time to pull against his saner inclinations.
While he ate his two eggs and his four pieces of toast, as he had done every morning for the last fifteen years, he remembered, with a mild pang of remorse, that he had not seen Laura since his return. Without doubt she had expected him last evening, had put on, probably, her most becoming gown to receive him; and the thought of her disappointment entered his heart with a very positive reproach. This reproach, short lived as it was, had the effect of enkindling his imaginary picture of her; and the eagerness with which he now looked forward to his visit completely crowded from his mind the recollection that, but for his own fault, he might have seen her with as little effort on the evening before.
As he sat there over his breakfast, with an unfolded newspaper on the table beside him, he realised, in a proper spirit of thankfulness, that he had never felt himself to be in a more thoroughly domestic mood. His face, in which the clear red from his country trip was still visible, settled immediately into its most genial lines, while he expanded his chest with a deep breath which strained the topmost button on the new English waistcoat which he wore. The sober prospect of marriage no longer annoyed him when he thought of it, and he could even look forward complacently to seeing the same woman opposite to him at breakfast for twenty years.