"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
"But you've given up the car."
"Yes, I have, but—after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again! And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the key!"
He gave her the key.
"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come in hang the key on the nail in the office."
Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the
Rue de Clèves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in which to fight with her disinclination.
"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I can't tell him in the street!"
For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the concierge watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched the town.
"There'll come a moment," she said to herself as the street door opened and he joined her and climbed into the car, "when it'll come of itself, when it will be easy and natural."