Luc smiled.
“I am so exactly the same as every one else, Madame,” he said, in a deprecating tone. “I am just struggling for some little sphere in which I can let my soul spread its wings—I have that restlessness to achieve something which many better men lack,” he added, thinking of his father and Joseph; “yet I dare not profane it, for it is the highest thing I know.” He fixed his eyes on her gravely, and she moved towards the wallflowers, away from him.
“I wish I had left you alone,” she said.
Luc flushed swiftly.
“Have you found me so ungrateful?”
“You have nothing to be grateful for,” she replied, narrowing her eyes on him, “I only fear that some day you may come to dislike me.”
She had not said or done anything to destroy the mental image he cherished of a slightly mysterious creature, fiery and pure, disdainful of the world and at heart tender and a little sad; he therefore smiled at her words, which he thought showed her ignorance of his conception of her, and looked at her with his serene, enthusiastic glance, before which her dark eyes fell.
“You are very sure of your own creeds,” she said irrelevantly, “and narrow too, at the best—I think.”
He admitted to not following her thought, and she answered his admission by a half-scornful, half-terrified little laugh.
“Do you really not understand me?” she asked.