So much the same! He leaned forward and looked down into the silent rue du Val-de-Grâce. He was thinking how she had once stood where he was leaning now; thinking how he had leaned there so often, looking for her return up that narrow thoroughfare, waiting for the sound of her light footfall on the stair. So much the same, indeed: the unchanged street outside, the unchanged room within; the room in which he had found her on that February night. Here she had admitted that she loved him, and here she had said the good-by that he would not understand—a few short weeks ago. And now he was back—back after having heard her repudiate him, back after losing her forever.
Fate works everywhere, but her favorite workshop is Paris. Something was moving in the deepest shadow in the room—the shadow about the doorway. Blue-black hair and long-lashed eyes of violet, lips of red and cheeks of white and pink; the incredible was realized, the miracle had happened: Vitoria was here.
He was beside her in a single bound. He thought that he cried her name aloud; in reality, his lips moved without speech.
“Wait,” she said. She drew away from him; but the statues of the Greek gods in the Luxembourg gardens must have felt the thrill in the evening air as she faced him. She was looking at him bravely with only the least tremor of her lips. “Do you—do you still love me?” she asked.
Her voice was like a violin; her words dazed him.
“Love you? I—I can’t tell you how much—I—haven’t the words to say——”
He seized the hand with which she had checked him and kissed its unjeweled fingers.
“What is it?... Why did you say you hated me?... What has brought you back?... Is is true? Is it true?”
From Refrogné’s garden came the last good-night-song of the birds.
“Love you? Why, from the day I left you—no, from that night I found you here, I’ve thought nothing but Vitoria, dreamed nothing but Vitoria——”