"Thanks, Piquette—you're my good angel. I do seem to need you, don't I?"
"I 'ope you do, mon vieux," she said quietly. And then, "Go an' 'urry back. I will wait for you."
Thus it was that the next day found Jim Horton and Piquette together in a compartment of the Marseilles Express on their way to the Riviera. Jim had managed to get reservations in a train which was now running regularly, and then, after advising Piquette, had returned to his lodgings in the Rue Jean Paul, meeting her at the Gare de Lyon at noon. Piquette seemed to have thought of everything that he had forgotten, and greeted him with an air of gayety which did much to restore his drooping spirits. It was very cozy, very comfortable, in their compartment à deux, and Piquette looked upon the excursion from the angle of the child ready and willing to take a new pleasure in anything. Curiously enough, she had traveled little—only once to the Côte d'Azur, and looked forward with delight to the southern sunshine, the blue of the sea, and the glimpse of the world of fashion which was once more to be seen upon the Promenade des Anglais. The passing landscape she greeted with little childish cries as she recognized familiar scenes—the upper reaches of the Seine, Juvisy, then Arpajon, Etampes and Orleans.
And Jim Horton sat watching her, detached by her magnetism from the gloom of his thoughts, aware of the quality of her devotion to this newly found friend for whom with joyous carelessness she was risking the good-will of her patron, the displeasure of her bloodthirsty friends of earlier days and even perhaps her very life. She was a new event in his experience, giving him a different meaning for many things. There had been no new passages of anything approaching sentiment between them and he watched her curiously. It seemed that what she wished him to understand was that she was merely a good friend that he could tie to and be understood by. Even when he took her hand in his—a natural impulse on Jim's part when it lay for a moment beside him—she only let it rest there a moment and then gave a careless gesture or made a swift useful motion which dispelled illusions and exorcised sentiment. And yet of sentiment of another sort she was full, fairly bubbling over with sympathy and encouragement, inviting him to share her enjoyment of the gray and brown pastoral from the car window, peaceful, beautiful and untouched by the rough hand of war. It was a kind of friendship he couldn't understand and wouldn't have understood perhaps even if he had been skilled in the knowledge of women. And yet, there it was, very real, very vital to him in all its beauty and self-effacement.
Whatever her past, her strange philosophy of life, her unique code of morals, he had to admit to himself that she was a fine young animal, feminine to the last glossy hair of her head, and compact of splendid forces which had been diverted—of virtues which refused to be stifled by the mere accident of environment. But most of all was she that product of the Latin Quarter, which knows and shares poverty and affluence, friendship and enmity,—the gamine, the bonne camarade.
She thought nothing of her exploit in rescuing him from the house in the Rue Charron, nor would she permit a repetition of his admiration and gratitude. The impulse that had driven her to the rescue was spontaneous. He was one she knew, an American soldier, a friend of France, in trouble. Was not that enough?
As the day wore on Piquette grew tired looking at the scenery and after yawning once or twice, laid her head quite frankly upon his shoulder with all the grace of a tired child and immediately went to sleep. Jim Horton smiled down at her with a new sense of pride in this strange friendship, admiring the fine level brows, the shadows on her eye-lids, slightly tinted with blue, the well-turned nose, the scarlet curve of her under lip and the firm line of her jaw and chin. Two outcasts they were, he and she, strangely met and more strangely linked in the common purpose of protecting the destinies of a decadent French gentleman whom Jim Horton had never seen and in whom he had no interest. And Piquette——? What was her motive? Her loyalty to de Vautrin, unlike that which she had shown for him, was spasmodic, actuated by no affection but only by the humor of the moment. She did not love this man. He had never been to her anything more than a convenience.
He smiled. The word suggested a thought to him. Convenience! Was this relation of Piquette to her patron any worse than those marriages of the ambitious girls of his own country, without love, often without hope of love, to bring themselves up in the world? Piquette at least was honest—with the patron and with herself.
The vows at the altar were sacred. He knew how sacred now. He had not dared to think of Moira and he knew that it was well that Piquette had kept his thoughts from her. But now as his companion slept, his arm around her slim figure, he began to think of Moira and the tragic decision that he had given her to make. She had chosen to remain there in the Rue de Tavennes because that was the only home she knew, and in the agony of her mind she felt that she must find sanctuary in her own room with her thoughts and her prayers. And the love she bore him, he knew was not a mere passing fancy, born of their strange romance, but a living flame of pure passion, which could only be dimmed by her duty to her conscience—but not extinguished.
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