"The head-waiter thinks some people who came from Italy must have brought the mosquitoes in their luggage."
"Oh?" said the boy.
"I believe this is a mosquito bite on my cheek," she added. "Look!"
She turned her cheek, and leant forward. He leant forward too. Her face had never been so close to him, his fingers craved its softness—he only realised that, with courage, he might touch it with a finger. And the courage was not there.
"My hand is cold," he said, hoarsely. And afterwards, too, he used to wonder whether he had been excusing his cowardice to himself, or to her.
And yet it was with no abashment that he tramped his bedroom later. It was with an exaltation that panted for vast solitudes. The whirl of the unexpected was in his being. The marvel of her hand, the marvel that she had let him hold her hand, uplifted him beyond belief. And through all the turbulence of his pulses and his mind there was not a carnal thought, not an instant's base imagining. He adored her without desire, without reflection, without asking what he adored.
When he was alone with her once more during some minutes he tried, trembling, to examine the ring again.
"No," she said gently; "it's wrong."
And in the next few days nothing happened, one day was like another.
Then the date of his departure was settled. He looked for her as soon as he read the news, sought her dismayed because he was to go, and twice unhappy because on his last evening she would be out. She was shopping, and he met her at the corner of la Rue Thiers, where the horlogerie is.