“Why not?”
She leant back in her chair, and a smile so sad that involuntarily he turned away, came creeping round her lips.
“Because I’m a woman,” she replied.
He made no reply. The meaning of her words did not escape him, but in a moment she translated them.
“You’ve painted me at the end of my beaux jours,” she said. “Before they are quite over—but at the end. I’m very grateful. But I couldn’t live with that picture, it would be too——”
She did not finish the sentence.
“Besides,—there’s another reason,” she added after a further pause.
“What’s this?” asked François, suddenly taking a book from the table. With a sort of blind haste, he strove to hinder her next words by snatching at any pretext to arrest them.
“It’s a book you lent me, nearly three years ago, I’m ashamed to say. When I first came to Paris. I’ve always forgotten to return it. But to-day,” she paused as though her mind were wandering away from the present. “To-day I remembered it.”
François took it up.