“You’re an angel, faintly disguised. Only—look around here—only, Angelica, don’t try to practise woman’s humbug on a woman. At least, not on this old one. It doesn’t work. I’ll tell you whom I mean.” She pulled, but Marguerite held off. “I mean,” she hoarsely whispered,—“I mean the young inventor that engineer told us about. Remember?”
Marguerite, with her head bowed low, slowly dragged her hand free, and moved with growing speed up the stairs, saying:
“I dawn’t know what is dat. I dawn’t awnstan you ’t all.” Her last words trembled as if nigh to tears. At the top of the stairs the searching murmur of her friend’s voice came up, and she turned and looked back.
“Forgive me!” said the figure below. The girl stood a moment, sending down a re-assuring smile.
“You young rogue!” murmured the lady, looking up with ravished eyes. Then she lifted herself on tiptoe, made a trumpet of both little hands, and whispered:
“Don’t—worry! We’ll bring it out—all right!”
Whereat Marguerite blushed from temple to throat, and vanished.
The same day word came from her mother of her return from Terrebonne, and she hastened to rejoin her in their snug rooms over the Women’s Exchange. When she snatched Zoséphine into her arms and shed tears, the mother merely wiped and kissed them away, and asked no explanation.
The two were soon apart. For Marguerite hungered unceasingly for solitude. Only in solitude could she, or dared she, give herself up to the constant recapitulation of every minutest incident of the morning. And that was ample employment. They seemed the happenings of a month ago. She felt as if it were imperative to fix them in her memory now, or lose them in confusion and oblivion forever. Over them all again and again she went, sometimes quickening memory with half-spoken words, sometimes halting in long reverie at some intense juncture: now with tingling pleasure at the unveiling of the portrait, the painter’s cautionary revelation of the personal presence above, or Claude’s appearance at the window; now with burnings of self-abasement at the passionate but ineffectual beseechings of her violin; and always ending with her face in her hands, as though to hide her face even from herself for shame that with all her calling—her barefaced, as it seemed to her, her abject calling—he had not come.
“Marguerite, my child, it is time for bed.”