Colville took the vacant seat in Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence’s brougham. She still held a handkerchief in her hand.
“I do not mind for myself,” she exclaimed, suddenly, when the carriage moved out of the court-yard. “It is only for your sake, Dormer.”
She turned and glanced at him with eyes that shone, but not with tears.
“Oh! Don’t you understand?” she asked, in a whisper. “Don’t you see, Dormer?”
“A way out of it?” he answered, hurriedly, almost interrupting her. He withdrew his hand, upon which she had laid her own; withdrew it sympathetically, almost tenderly. “See a way out of it?” he repeated, in a reflective and business-like voice. “No, I am afraid, for the moment, I don’t.”
He sat stroking his moustache, looking out of the window, while she looked out of the other, resolutely blinking back her tears. They drove back to her hotel without speaking.
CHAPTER XXXIV — A SORDID MATTER
“Bon Dieu! my old friend, what do you expect?” replied Madame de Chantonnay to a rather incoherent statement made to her one May afternoon by the Marquis de Gemosac. “It is the month of May,” she further explained, indicating with a gesture of her dimpled hand the roses abloom all around them. For the Marquis had found her in a chair beneath the mulberry-tree in the old garden of that house near Gemosac which looks across the river toward the sea. “It is the month of May. One is young. Such things have happened since the world began. They will happen until it ends, Marquis. It happened in our own time, if I remember correctly.”