Nancy withdrew herself gently from her husband's arm. It seemed to her that every one in that merry, slowly moving crowd on either side must see that he was holding her to him. She was a shy, sensitive little creature, this three-weeks-old bride, whose honeymoon was now about to merge into happy every-day life.
Dampier divined something of what she was feeling. He put out his hand and clasped hers. "Silly sweetheart," he whispered. "All these merry, chattering people are far too full of themselves to be thinking of us!"
As she made no answer, bewildered, a little oppressed by the brilliance, the strangeness of everything about them, he added a little anxiously, "Darling, are you tired? Would you rather go straight to the hotel?"
But pressing closer to him, Nancy shook her head. "No, no, Jack! I'm not a bit tired. It was you who were tired to-day, not I!"
"I didn't feel well in the train, 'tis true. But now that I'm in Paris I could stay out all night! I suppose you've never read George Moore's description of this very drive we're taking, little girl?"
And again Nancy shook her head, and smiled in the darkness. In the world where she had lived her short life, in the comfortable, unimaginative world in which Nancy Tremain, the delightfully pretty, fairly well-dowered, orphan, had drifted about since she had been "grown-up," no one had ever heard of George Moore.
Strange, even in some ways amazing, their marriage—hers and Jack Dampier's—had been! He, the clever, devil-may-care artist, unconventional in all his ways, very much a Bohemian, knowing little of his native country, England, for he had lived all his youth and working life in France—and she, in everything, save an instinctive love of beauty, which, oddly yet naturally enough, only betrayed itself in her dress, the exact opposite!
A commission from an English country gentleman who had fancied a portrait shown by Dampier in the Salon, had brought the artist, rather reluctantly, across the Channel, and an accident—sometimes it made them both shiver to realise how slight an accident—had led to their first and decisive meeting.
Nancy Tremain had been brought over to tea, one cold, snowy afternoon, at the house where Dampier was painting. She had been dressed all in grey, and the graceful velvet gown and furry cap-like toque had made her look, in his eyes, like an exquisite Eighteenth Century pastel.
One glance—so Dampier had often since assured her and she never grew tired of hearing it—had been enough. They had scarcely spoken the one to the other, but he had found out her name, and, writing, cajoled her into seeing him again. Very soon he had captured her in the good old way, as women—or so men like to think—prefer to be wooed, by right of conquest.