"My wound? You tempt me to seek another!"
"Don't be absurd." He was still holding her hand, and she made no move to free it, but seeming forgetful of it altogether, lingered on. "I shall miss you, monsieur. The château will seem lonely when I return, I shall feel its loneliness more than I have ever felt it."
"And the world, madame," said Duchemin--"the world into which I must go--it, too, will seem a lonely place,--a desert, haunted..."
"You will soon forget ... Château de Montalais."
"Forget! when all I shall have will be my memories--!"
"Yes," she said, "we shall both have memories..." And suddenly the rich, deep voice quoted in English: "'Memories like almighty wine.'"
She offered to disengage her hand, but Duchemin tightened gently the pressure of his fingers, bowing over it and, as he looked up for her answer, murmuring: "With permission?" She gave the slightest inclination of her head. His lips touched her hand for a moment; then he released it. She went swiftly to the door, faltered, turned.
"We shall see each other in the morning--to say au revoir. With us, monsieur, it must never be adieu."
She was gone; but she had left Duchemin with a singing heart that would not let him sleep when he had gone to bed, stared blankly at the last chapter of Bragelonne for an hour, and put out his candle.
Till long after midnight he tossed restlessly, bedevilled alternately by melancholy and exhilaration, or lay staring blindly into the darkness, striving to focus his thoughts upon the abstract, a hopeless effort; trying to think where to go to-morrow, whither to turn his feet when the gates of Paradise had closed behind him, and knowing it did not matter, he did not care, that hereafter one place and another would be the same to him, so that they were not the place of her abode.