He knew she spoke of M. Villefort, and the thought jarred upon him.
“He does not suffer,” he said. “He is not of the fibre to feel pain.”
And he wondered why she shrank from him a little and answered with a sad bitterness:—
“Are you sure? You did not know that!”—
“Forgive me,” he said brokenly, the face he lifted, haggard with his unhappiness. “Forgive me, for I have lost so much.”
She wasted few words and no tears. The force and suddenness of his emotion and her own had overborne her into this strange unmeant confession; but her mood was unlike his,—it was merely receptive. She listened to his unavailing regrets, but told him little of her own past.
“It does not matter,” she said drearily. “It is all over. Let it rest. The pain of to-day and tomorrow is enough for us. We have borne yesterday; why should we want it back again?”
And when they parted she said only one thing of the future:—
“There is no need that we should talk. There is nothing for us beyond this point. We can only go back. We must try to forget—and be satisfied with our absinthe.”
Instead of returning to his hotel, Edmondstone found his way to the Champs Élysées, and finally to the Bois. He was too wretched to have any purpose in his wanderings. He walked rapidly, looking straight before him and seeing nobody. He scarcely understood his own fierce emotions Hitherto his fancies had brought him a vague rapture; now he experienced absolute anguish, Every past experience had become trivial. What happiness is so keen as one’s briefest pain? As he walked he lived again the days he had thrown away. He remembered a thousand old, yet new, phases of Bertha’s girlhood. He thought of times when she had touched or irritated or pleased him. When he had left Paris for Rome she had not bidden him good-by. Jenny, her younger sister, had told him that she was not well.