After a time the young man came back and sat down beside her. His face was white and his eyes were luminous.
"Most dear and kind friend, forgive me," he said, very gently. "I have climbed giddy pinnacles of rapture, and tumbled off them—plop—into blackest morasses of despair to-day, and my nerves have suffered."
"Ah! it has got you!" she returned. "I'm not a bit sorry for you. On the contrary, I congratulate you. For you are very handsomely and hopelessly in love."
Adrian nodded assent, pushing up the ends of his mustache with a twist of his fingers and smiling.
"Yes, yes, indeed I know," he said. "It is a thing for which to be immeasurably thankful. Yet, all the same, it has its little hours of inconvenience, as I have to-day discovered. It can hold the field to the exclusion of all else; and that with a quite demoralizing intensity, making one feel murderous toward one's oldest friends and, in respect of one's work, no better than a driveling idiot."
"Such are inevitable symptoms of the blessed state. I still congratulate you."
"But you admit, at least, that they are practically extremely impeding? And so, dear Mademoiselle, you whom my mother loved and who loved my mother, you who have done so much to help and comfort me in the last half-hour—will you do something more?"
"I suppose I shall," Anastasia answered, with a laugh which was against herself rather than against him. "I seem to be pretty thoroughly committed to this business for—well, for two people's sakes, perhaps."
"Yes, for her sake also—for hers as well as mine," Adrian cried, impetuously. "Those few words are beautifully full of encouragement. For see here," he went on, "in some ways I am just simply an obstinate, pig-headed Englishman. You permit me to speak quite freely? Loosing her, I cannot console myself elsewhere. It is not merely a wife that I want; having reached the age when a man should range himself a well-bred, healthy, and generally unexceptionable mother for his children! Don't imagine that I would not like to make my subscription to humanity in the form of charming babies. Of course I should. Still those small people, however beguiling, are not to the point in this connection. I am not in pursuit of a suitable marriage, but of—"
"La belle Gabrielle—only and solely la belle Gabrielle—that must be conspicuously evident to the meanest intelligence," Anastasia put in, merrily. "But there, unfortunately, we run up against the crux of the whole situation. For, it is only fair to tell you, our exquisite young woman is even less in pursuit of a suitable marriage than you yourself are. We have had some intimate conversations, she and I. Don't imagine for an instant your name, or any other name, has been hinted at, much less mentioned. But she has been good enough to bestow her confidence upon me, in as far as she bestows it upon any one. Fundamentally she is a mysterious creature, and that's exactly why, I suppose, one finds her so endlessly interesting. And, from those conversations, I gather her mind is set on things quite other than marriage."