“There’s a picture there,” he repeated.
“Hang the picture!” exclaimed Dacier and Thouret together. “Mademoiselle Anne Page is coming to Paris. Aren’t you, mademoiselle?”
Anne shook her head. “I never go anywhere.” She was still smiling, but François felt a sudden pang of pity and compunction. To his sensitive ear, the words were an epitome of Anne’s life.
When it was growing dusk, they rose, and this evening Anne did not ask them to stay.
Often when it was dull, or too cold to sit in the garden, she took them into the library, showed them her favourite books, sometimes read to them. Because as Dacier said, it was good for their English accent, and she had such a beautiful voice.
To-day she walked with them to the porch, and said good-bye, in a tone that was as friendly as ever.
“Tell me when you decide to go,” she said. “We must have a picnic or something for farewell.”
François turned at the gate, and saw her standing in the porch, her dress startlingly white in the dusk. He shrugged his shoulders, but involuntarily the troubling sense of having wounded some defenceless creature, returned to him. He told himself that he was a sentimental fool, but the illusion did not vanish.
XIII
For the next week, Anne saw little of her friends.