The priest was looking keenly at him.
“I did not say 'thou,' but 'you,'” he persisted gently.
Vellacott's glance wavered; he raised his head, and looked out of the open port-hole across the glassy waters of the river.
“What do you mean?” he inquired.
“I thought,” said René Drucquer, “there might be some one else—some woman—who was waiting for news.”
After a little pause the journalist replied.
“My dear Abbé,” he said, “there is no woman in the whole world who wants news of me. And the result is, as you kindly say, I am a great man now—in my way.”
But he knew that he might have been a greater.