La belle Gabrielle had turned her head. She looked straight at him. The timid ghost of her mysterious, finely malicious smile visited her lips. Yet seen through the mist of her fluttering veil her eyes were singularly soft and lovely, wistful—so, at least, it seemed to Adrian—with the dawning of a sentiment other than that of bare friendship. Whereupon the young man's heart began to thump against his ribs again, while the engines of the car broke into a most marvelous sweet singing.
"I am not sure," she commenced, speaking with engaging hesitation, "whether, perhaps, since I am, thanks to le bon Dieu, here in safety and about to return unhurt to my child and my mother, it is not well I should have had this trial. For you did come in time—yes, mercifully in time. I doubt if I could have endured much longer. There were other things," she went on, hurriedly, "besides those which I consciously heard or saw which combined to disgust and terrify me. You, too, believe, do you not, that thoughts may acquire a separate existence—thoughts, purposes, imaginations—and that they may inhabit particular places? I cannot explain, but by such things I believe myself to be surrounded. I felt they might break through whatever restraining medium withheld them, and become visible. A little longer and my reason, too, might have given way—" She paused. "But you came—you came—"
"Yes, I came," Adrian repeated quietly.
"And, that being so—I being mercifully spared the worst, being unhurt, I mean—"
"Yes, precisely—unhurt," he repeated with praiseworthy docility.
"This experience may be of value. It may help to make me revise some mistaken ideas"—she turned away, and, though her head was held high, tears, as Adrian noted, were again somewhat in evidence—"some perhaps foolishly self-willed and—how shall I say?—conceited opinions."
In the last few minutes the car had traversed one of those unkempt and, in a sense, nomadic districts common to the fringe of all great cities. Spaces of waste land, littered with nondescript rubbish and materials for new buildings in course of noisy construction, alternated with rows of low-class houses, off the walls of which the plaster cracked and scaled; with long lines of hoardings displaying liberal assortment of flaming posters; wine-shops at once shabby and showy, crude reds, greens, and yellows adorning their wooden balconies and striped, flapping awnings; gaudy-fronted dancing-booths and shooting-galleries tailing away at the back into neglected weed-grown gardens. All these, with a sparse population, male and female, very much to match; while here and there some solitary shuttered dwelling standing back from the wide avenue in an inclosed plot of ground betrayed a countenance suggestive of disquieting adventures.
As Madame St. Leger finished making her, to Adrian, very touching confession, the automobile, quitting these doubtful purlieus—which, however, thanks to a charm of early summer foliage and generous breadth of sunshine, took on an air of jovial devil-may-care vagabondage, inspiriting rather than objectionable—headed eastward, along the boulevard skirting the grass-grown slopes and mounds of the dismantled fortifications, and drew up opposite the entrance to the Parc de Montsouris. Here, Adrian proposed they should alight and stroll in the tree-shaded alleys, as a relief from the dust and noise of the streets.
But once on her feet, Gabrielle discovered how very tired she still was, weak-kneed and tremulous to the point of gladly accepting the support of her companion's arm. This renewed contact, though of a comparatively perfunctory and unofficial character, proved by no means displeasing to Adrian. In truth it gave him such a lively sense of happiness, that to his dying day he will cherish a romantic affection for those remote and unfashionable pleasure-grounds upon the southern heights. Happiness is really the simplest of God's creatures—easily gratified, large in charity, hospitable to all the minor poetry of life. Whence it came about that this critical, traveled, shrewd, and smart young gentleman had never, surely, beheld trees so green, flower-borders so radiant, walks so smooth and well-swept, statues so noble, cascades so musical, lakes so limpid and so truthfully mirroring the limpid heavens above. Even the rococo and slightly ridiculous reproduction of the Palace of the Bey of Tunis, now used as an observatory, which crowns the highest ground, its domes, cupolas, somberly painted mural surfaces, peacock-blue encaustic tiles, and rows of horseshoe-headed Moorish arches—looking in its modern Western surroundings about as congruous as a camel in a cabbage-patch—presented itself to his happy eyes with all the allurements of some genii-and-gem-built palace from out the immortal pages of the Arabian Nights. Gabrielle St. Leger's hand rested upon his arm, her feet kept step with his feet. The folds of her dainty gown swept lightly against him as he walked. Past and future fell out of the reckoning. Nothing obtained save the beatified present, while his heart and his senses were, at once, sharply hungry and exquisitely at peace.
The grounds were practically deserted. Only a few employees from the observatory, blue-habited gardeners, a batch of Cook's tourists—English and American—weary with sight-seeing, and some respectable French fathers of families, imparting, al fresco, instruction in local natural science, topography and art, to their progeny, were at hand to greet the passing couple with starings, sympathetic, self-consicous, or envious, as the case might be. Among the first ranked the French fathers of families, who paused in frank admiration and interest.