“If we hadn’t known him we shouldn’t have known YOU. Remember it was Mr. Flack who brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow’s.”
“Oh you’d have come some other way,” said Gaston, who made nothing of that.
“Not in the least. We knew nothing about any other way. He helped us in everything—he showed us everything. That was why I told him—when he asked me. I liked him for what he had done.”
Gaston, who had now also seated himself, listened to this attentively. “I see. It was a kind of delicacy.”
“Oh a ‘kind’!” She desperately smiled.
He remained a little with his eyes on her face. “Was it for me?”
“Of course it was for you.”
“Ah how strange you are!” he cried with tenderness. “Such contradictions—on s’y perd. I wish you’d say that to THEM, that way. Everything would be right.”
“Never, never!” said the girl. “I’ve wronged them, and nothing will ever be the same again. It was fatal. If I felt as they do I too would loathe the person who should have done such a thing. It doesn’t seem to me so bad—the thing in the paper; but you know best. You must go back to them. You know best,” she repeated.
“They were the last, the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of desecration, of pollution, you see”—he explained as if for conscience.