"Madame," he replied in a quiet voice, "I have been in Africa for more than twenty years. The Paris I knew exists no more."
She turned her gaze full on him. The freshness of the man appeared suddenly to her. An involuntary little blush suffused her face. She covered it by a slight withdrawal from the fire.
"Tell me about Africa," she commanded.
He spoke at first depreciatingly of the country, the grave of so many of France's best, so remote from all that to a Frenchman makes life worth while. Then as he warmed to his description she saw that he loved that parched land of immense distances where the pitiless sun consumes the human soul or heats it to an intense unworldly fervour. He told of interminable marches over the glowing sands, of forgotten skirmishes where a wound was worse than death, of fierce razzias, of lonely outpost nights in the desert underneath a miracle of stars, where under the naked presence of the infinite one watched, finger on trigger, for the gleam of a creeping burnous. She found herself seeking to detect a deliberate elimination of the feminine in his reminiscences. With sure instinct she felt there was a woman somewhere in the background. How far back?
"You have suffered much," she said, her deep rich voice all sympathy.
"Who has not suffered who lives?" he replied.
There was again a pause, where the breathing of the couched dog was the only sound.
"Will you not play something?" he asked, suddenly, looking at the piano. "My opportunities have been few——"
She rose, went to the piano, and seated herself without a word. She played, not with the brilliance of the showy amateur nor with the hard precision of the professional, but as though the notes on which her light fingers fell re-echoed an intimate music of the soul. Through the grave breath-restrained emotion of a Chopin Nocturne she led him, then, with an enigmatic inconsequence, into the flitting, dainty, Harlequin and Columbine passion of a Chaminade that left a question poised, smilingly. A moment's interval, and with a deep contralto voice she commenced to sing a chanson of old France, that followed, simply, exquisite quiet notes, compact of love and the tragedy of love, poignantly eloquent in their unadorned statement of the theme. He went across to the piano, stood over her. She felt his presence very close. A thrill passed into her voice, magical. She finished and stood up with a sudden movement. His glowing eyes were full with tears.
"Bonsoir, monsieur," she said abruptly, stretching out her hand. The voice was not her own.