“Evidently,” conceded Margaret. “But where did you meet Maurice?”
“On the Reclus bridge.”
“Just now?”
“Oh, no. It was before my music lesson, an hour or two ago.”
“Where was he going?”
“I’ve not the slightest idea. You tell him for me that he’s not very nice.”
“I’ll tell him so most assuredly. With my friends especially it was unpardonable of him.”
“I forgive him just the same,” averred Jeanne Sassenay, bursting into a laugh, which showed a row of white and hearty little teeth.
Left alone again, Margaret saw the open door of the church, and stepped inside the holy place a moment. At this hour there were only two or three forms bent in prayer here and there beneath the vaulted ceiling. But for herself she had great difficulty in saying any prayers: sometimes her thoughts would run on what a charming wife this young girl, so lively and gay and yet serious, too, would make for her brother Maurice in two or three years: sometimes she would recall her father’s anxious face as she had left him. Of herself she did not think at all. At the threshold it struck her all at once that her meditations had not been for herself or her fiancé.
With new resolution she returned again to the Frasne offices, but with no more success than before. This time she did not ring Mrs. Frasne’s bell, but for the sake of peace resigned herself at last to defeat. As she went up Boigne Street again in the fading daylight, the tower of the archives and the castle turret opposite her were outlined against a reddened sky. In the flaming sunset these witnesses of the past rose up in all their glory, as if to show their splendour one last time before they crumbled down. It was one of those evenings of apotheosis that come in autumn, with a glory all the more moving for being fragile—one of those moments of grandeur that are the prelude to decay.