Miss Beauchamp uttered a sharp exclamation, which she vainly attempted to mask by a cough. Adrian Savage looked, saw, and turned his back. He stared blindly out of window at Paris beneath, sparkling in the keen-edged February sunshine. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He had received an agonizing, a hateful impression, amounting, sound and self-confident though he was, to acute physical pain. "No, not that, not that," he cried to himself. "Of all conceivable combinations, not that one. It is hideous, unbearable, out of nature!"
Miss Beauchamp touched him on the arm. Her face spoke volumes.
"Talk to me, my dear Savage," she said, urgently. "I can imagine what you feel. But talk. Create some, any excuse for staying, and take It, that depraved little horror, away with you when you go. Rally your resources, my dear friend. Play up, I entreat you, play up."
Then louder.
"You had a deplorable crossing—fog, coming into Calais? Yes, February is among the most odious months of the year. But I go over so seldom now, you know, since my poor brother's death. Nearly all my friends are on this side; and, after all, one only has to wait. Everybody who is anybody must pass through Paris sooner or later.—Talk, my dear Savage, talk. Support me.—Ah yes, in London you observed many changes? I hear a mania has taken the authorities lately for improvements. You did not stay in town? Ah no, of course not. Stourmouth?—Yes, I remember the place vaguely. Interminable black fir-trees and interminable, perambulating pink-and-white consumptives—I like neither. Yes, talk—talk—my own remarks are abysmal in their fatuity. But no matter. It's all in a good cause. Let us keep on."
René, meanwhile, successfully affected ignorance of any human presences save those of his hostess and his little guide.
"Why have you refused me? Why have you never let me see you?" he asked, gazing mournfully at Madame St. Leger.
"I have not been receiving," she replied. "My mother has been ailing, and my time has been devoted to her."
"But to see me, even to be aware that I was near her, would have done her good," he returned. "She has a great regard for me; and, in the case of a sensitive organization, the proximity of a person to whom one is attached acts as a restorative. It was on that account I have needed to come here. I, too, have been ailing. My exhibition is a howling success. Being a person of refinement, this naturally has disagreed with me, inducing repeated fits of the spleen, flooring me with a dumb rage of melancholy. As a corrective I required the soothing society of Madame, your mother, and of Mademoiselle Bette. I required also to be with you, Madame, to look at you. This I believed would prove beneficial to my nerves, lacerated by frenzied public admiration. By excluding me, you have not only wounded my susceptibilities, but prolonged my ill health. As I have already proved to you, Madame Vernois's regrettable illness is no sufficient reason for that exclusion. There must have been some further reason."
"There was a further reason," Gabrielle replied, quietly.