"Believe me, l'ami, I hoped it would not come to this. I'm so careless, Andrew. I don't think—I forget. You see, we are different, nous autres. What are little things to other women are great things to us, and what are great things to them—"
Then she looked into his eyes. Almost unconsciously, her fingers touched his arm.
"I wish I could make you understand," she added. "Even with me, there is only one thing that can justify—"
She paused for a breath, with a gesture toward the open window.
"It was to get away from all that that I came—to forget—to be alone with you—just we together—two children—to have something different. I'm so tired of it all, Andrew—and—there has never been any one like you. I didn't think what it would mean. Ah, my friend—"
She sank back upon the cushion, with a little sigh.
Suddenly Andrew's heart contracted, seemed to mount into his throat, and, repulsed, beat wildly against the bars of its prison. He felt the tremor of its pulsing in his wrists, in his temples, in his ears. He knew that he was colouring deeply. He strove to tighten his lips, but they parted in spite of him, and the breath shot through with a little hiss. Then he came to himself, and saw that the girl's eyes had closed, and that her hand on the arm of the chair had gripped the silken scarf. Folds of it, sharpened to the thinness of paper, came out between her fingers, and her knuckles showed like little bosses of tinted ivory through the pink flesh.
What was it? The hand of a passing spirit, wholly unfamiliar, had touched him; a voice never heard before had whispered something in his ear. What was it—what was this thing which he understood and did not understand? Bending slightly forward, he looked down through the ironwork railing at the street below. A solitary cab leaned maudlinly over the kerb, the driver slewed around in his seat, with his elbow on the roof, and his varnished hat on the back of his head, reading a newspaper; and the horse nodding, with his nose in a feed-bag. Two children were marching resolutely, hand in hand and out of step, their nurses following, with the gay plaid ribbons of their caps flapping about their hips. The pipe of an itinerant plumber whined and squeaked unmelodiously, and the horn of a passing automobile hiccoughed in the distance. Inconsequently there came to Andrew the memory of a sudden awakening from a nap on the beach at Newport. For a moment, everything in sight—people, houses, boats, the sand, the sunlight, and the sea—had been garbed in startling unreality, in a new, strange light.
The restlessness of a curious dissatisfaction suddenly laid hold upon him, and he rose and began to pace the salon once more. He would have given something to fling himself out of the chaos of conflicting thoughts which beset him, to ride, for example, five miles at a gallop, as he had been wont to do at Beverly, with the wind tearing at his hair and a thoroughbred lunging between his knees.
Presently he became aware that Mirabelle was watching him curiously, and was puzzled to find that for the first time he was not ready to meet her eyes. He seated himself at the piano, and for a moment fingered the music on the rack, without actually taking in the title—"Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2." Then he smiled, with a little nod as if he had been greeting an acquaintance on the street, and his hands fell upon the keys.