“It were better to say good-by now,” she said wearily.
“It will not be good-by, Mademoiselle.”
She shook her head and gave me her hand, and I remember now how heavily it lay for that short second in mine.
“Monsieur, I repeat, you make me do things I do not mean to do, that I have no right to do.”
“Wait until to-morrow,” I said, so completely happy that I tried to laugh her out of her mood and refused to perceive the solemnity and sadness that settled over her face.
* * * * *
I am glad now, as I look back, for that one hour of absolute faith in the future. Life was a certainty; I was filled with an eagerness to begin and in the knowledge of the rare and beautiful realization of happiness, I had not the slightest fear of the test of the morrow.
XIII
I spent the hours after supper in the smoking room, puffing at my pipe, with a new tolerant understanding of the young America before me; of these young spirits, with their exaggerated bursts of humor, their overflowing belief in themselves, their boyish eagerness to return to “God’s Country.”
“I wonder if they would ever agree on anything,” I thought, as I watched the nervous, combustible American need of reaction breaking out in sudden fits of gaiety. “So many minds; so many ideas!”