Her tone was so curt and short that it brought Fairfax back to realities.
"Why, pray, don't you find her paintable?" he asked.
The girl's voice was contemptuous. "I don't know. I didn't look at her with that idea."
Fairfax had nothing left him but his self-reproach, his humiliation, his sense of degradation, though God knows the outing was innocent enough! The Thing had happened. The Event had transpired. The veil had been drawn away from his heart when he saw her there in the park and spoke to her. The idea that she must think him light and vulgar-minded, an ordinary Bohemian, amusing himself as is the fashion in the Latin Quarter, was unbearable to him. He would have given his right hand to have been alone in the park and to have met her alone. Under the spell of his suffering, he said cruelly to the girl whom he had so wantonly captured—
"If you won't let me help you in my way, I'm afraid I can't help you at all."
And she returned, controlling her voice: "No, I am afraid you cannot help me."
He was unconscious of her until they reached the centre of Paris and he found himself in the street by her side, and they were crossing the Pond des Arts on foot. The lamps were lit. The tumult and stir of the city was around them, the odour of fires and the perfume of the city pungent to their nostrils. They walked along silently, and Fairfax asked her suddenly—
"Where shall I take you? Where do you live?" and realized as he spoke how little he knew of her, how unknown they were to each other, and yet what a factor she had been in his emotional life. He had held her in his arms and kissed her not three hours ago.
She put her hand out to him. "We will say good-bye here," she said evenly. "I can go home alone."