HE came through the town and up the Grand Rue.
When he reached the ramparts he took a seat, despite the nipping east wind.
He looked at his watch.
Just about this hour every day it was the custom of Madame de Warens and her niece to take a walk on the ramparts.
It seemed the only fixed thing, except meals, in their desolate lives, this walk every day on the ramparts.
Hellier would meet them there. It was a sort of tacit appointment. No person, unless they were curiously blind, could fail to see that it was a rendezvous. The women came and the young man came and walked with them up and down on this desolate place for half an hour or so, talked about everything and nothing, returning to the hotel where he left them, perhaps not to see them again till the following day.
This afternoon they were late. Hellier looked at his watch again, it was ten minutes past the time of the usual meeting. He was rising to return, with a desolate feeling at the heart, when, far off, coming towards him, he saw the figure of a girl. It was Mademoiselle Lefarge, and she was alone!
“My aunt was afraid of the east wind,” said the girl. “I came because I thought you possibly might be here and waiting for us; we have got so into the habit of meeting you that really it was like an appointment—your society in this desolate place has become quite one of our pleasures,” she said, “and it is bad to keep a friend who has given one pleasure waiting in the cold east wind.”
This was plunging into the middle of things; she spoke with the slightest foreign accent, and Hellier, an Englishman used to the convention-bound female, could not find words, or thoughts, to reply to her with for a moment.
It was not an awkward silence. They paused for a moment and looked over the rampart wall at the peaceful country, just tinged by the early spring, trees and fields, belfries and far-off hamlets, all under a sky sad coloured and beautiful, like that sky which dwells for ever over the “Avenue near Middleharnis.”