She was waiting for him when he returned to the Hôtel d'Angleterre.
"You were right about Marie," she acknowledged. "She has two brothers in the army. She has money enough for her fare to Paris, and is going as soon as possible."
"In the meanwhile she is safe enough here. So, en avant!"
He took her bag, and they stepped out into the sunshine.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE CORNICE ROAD
It was the Cornice Road that he followed—the broad white road that skirts the sea at the foot of the Alpes Maritimes. As far as Monte Carlo, he had walked it alone many the time. But he had never walked it with her, so it was a new road. It was a new world too, and as far as he was concerned there was no war. The blue sky overhead gave no hint of war; neither did the Mediterranean; neither did the trees full of singing birds; neither did the grasses and flowers: and these things, with the woman at his side, comprised, for the moment, his whole world. It was the world as originally created for man and woman. All that he was leaving behind—banks and hotels and taxis and servants and railroads—had nothing to do with the primal idea of creation. They were all extraneous. The heavens, the earth, the waters beneath the earth, man and woman created He them. That was all. That was enough.
Once or twice, alone in his camp in the Adirondacks, Monte had sensed this fact. With a bit of food to eat, a bit of tobacco to smoke in his old brier, a bit of ground to lie down upon at night, he had marveled that men found so many other things necessary to their comfort. But, after a week or two of that, he had always grown restless, and hurried back to New York and his club and his men servants. In turn he grew restless there, and hurried on to the still finer luxuries of the German liners and the Continent.
That was because he was lonesome—because she had not been with him. It was because—how clearly he saw it now!—he had never been complete by himself alone. He had been satisfying only half of himself. The other half he had tried to quiet with man-made things, with the artificial products of civilization. He had thought to allay that deep, undefined hunger in him with travel and sports and the attentions of hirelings. It had been easy at first; but, keen as nimble wits had been to keep pace with his desires with an ever-increasing variety of luxuries, he had exhausted them all within a decade and been left unsatisfied.