“As I am going in a different direction that makes all the greater separation.”
She answered nothing; she stood looking through the bars of the tall gate at the empty, dusky street. “This grille is like a cage,” she said, at last.
“Fortunately, it is a cage that will open.” And I laid my hand on the lock.
“Don’t open it,” and she pressed the gate back. “If you should open it I would go out—and never return.”
“Where should you go?”
“To America.”
“Straight away?”
“Somehow or other. I would go to the American consul. I would beg him to give me money—to help me.”
I received this assertion without a smile; I was not in a smiling humour. On the contrary, I felt singularly excited, and I kept my hand on the lock of the gate. I believed (or I thought I believed) what my companion said, and I had—absurd as it may appear—an irritated vision of her throwing herself upon consular sympathy. It seemed to me, for a moment, that to pass out of that gate with this yearning, straining, young creature, would be to pass into some mysterious felicity. If I were only a hero of romance, I would offer, myself, to take her to America.
In a moment more, perhaps, I should have persuaded myself that I was one, but at this juncture I heard a sound that was not romantic. It proved to be the very realistic tread of Célestine, the cook, who stood grinning at us as we turned about from our colloquy.