“The detail sunken, but the touch and the taste and the odour still. When we wronged each the other—”
“Long past that—long past!”
“And when we loved and helped each the other—and the amount and the bliss of that grows!”
“The old wronging was in ignorance.”
“In ignorance.”
The moon shone, the night wind breathed, the murmur of the streets lessened as the night grew old. The two went in from the roof, lay soon in deep sleep. In the morning they waked, then dressed and breakfasted, then stepped again upon the parapetted bit of roof. Paris lay in an early, a rosy light. They stood and gazed, and they saw round and round beyond Paris. Presently, leaving the roof and the two high-built rooms, they went down into the streets.
Autumn waned and with it hope of temperate change. Change was no less needed, no less inevitable, but change, it was seen, still wore a red garment. The time for her white garments delayed, delayed. Still blood-red....
Winter waxed and waned; spring was here and summer, summer of France. Here in the human heart of France was winter, and here it was torrid heat. September breathed over the land, but here in the heart of France the winter deepened, and here the heat encreased, encreased. Flame and murk in this heart of France, and the angel Alteration, red without as a demon....
Jean and Espérance Merlin did not go back to the house by the sea. It held them—Paris. Even in this to-day of the world children must have schooling. The two from the sea made a school in the storey beneath the storey of the two rooms and the parapetted roof. Here, each forenoon, they taught children of Paris, ten in all. They taught after the method the two had worked out, long years by the sea. Here as there it answered, making happy children, learning happily.
That half of the day gone, the children gone, the two in the rooms up under the roof ate their frugal, wholesome meal, rested, then when the sun was in the western quarter, went down into Paris.