"It is part of her code of friendship—it holds true all round. If she helps others—"
Madame St. Leger left her sentence unfinished and, glancing with a hint of veiled mockery at her guest, sat down in a carven, high-backed, rose-cushioned chair at right angles to the fireplace, and picked up a bundle of white needlework from the little table beside it.
"You mean that Miss Beauchamp does her best for me, too?" Adrian inquired, tentatively.
But the lady was too busy unfolding her work, finding needle and thimble to make answer.
"I foresee that I shall be compelled to print the wretched little Byewater in the end," he murmured, still tentatively.
"Did you not tell Miss Beauchamp you were going away?" Gabrielle asked. She had no desire to continue the conversation on this particular note.
"Yes, I leave Paris to-night. That is my excuse for asking to see you this afternoon. But I feel that my visit is ill-timed. I observed directly I came in that you looked a little fatigued. I fear you are suffering. Ought you to undertake the exertion of receiving visitors? I doubt it. Yet I should have been desolated had you refused me. For I leave, as I say, to-night in response to a sudden call to England upon business—that of certain members of my father's family. I am barely acquainted with them. But they claim my assistance, and I cannot refuse it. I could not do otherwise than tell you of this unexpected journey, could I? It distresses me to find you suffering."
Gabrielle had looked at him smiling, her lips closed, the little dimple again showing in her left cheek. His eagerness and volubility were diverting to her. They enabled her to think of him as still very young; and she quite earnestly wished thus to think of him. To do so made for security. At this period Madame St. Leger put a very high value upon security.
"But, indeed," she said, "I am quite well. The corridor is chilly, and I have been going to and fro preparing a little fête for Bette. She has her friends, our neighbor Madame Bernard's two little girls, from the floor below, to spend the afternoon with her. My mother is now kindly guarding the small flock. But I could not burden her with preliminaries.—I am quite well, and, for the moment, I am quite at leisure. Bring a chair. Sit down. It is for me to condole with you rather than for you to condole with me," she went on, in her quiet voice, "for this is far from the moment one would select for a cross-Channel journey! But then you are more English than French in all that. Hereditary instincts assert themselves in you. You have the islander's inborn sense of being cramped by the modest proportions of his island, and craving to step off the edge of it into space."
The young man placed his hat on the floor, opened the fronts of his overcoat, and drew a chair up to the near side of the low work-table whence he commanded an uninterrupted view of his hostess's charming person.