She looked at him gravely.
“I am glad,” she said, “that you are rich, but I am also glad that we have both been poor—together. Oh,”—she looked about the familiar room,—“it needs but one thing more: if only the street-organ were playing that Scotch song that it used to play!”
“If it only were!” he agreed. “However, we can’t have everything, can we?”
But lovers, if they only want it enough, can have everything, and, somehow, the hurdy-gurdy did, just at that moment, begin to play “Annie Laurie” as it used to do, out in the rue du Val-de-Grâce.
Cartaret led her toward the darkened window, but stopped half-way across the room.
“I will try to deserve you,” he said. “I will make myself what you want me to be.”
“You are that,” she answered, her face raised toward his. “All that I ask is to have you with me always as you are now.” The clear contralto of her voice ran like a refrain to the simple air of the ballad. “I want you with me when you are unhappy, so that I may comfort you; when you are ill, so that I may nurse you; when you are glad, so that I may be glad because you are. I want to know you in every mood: I want to belong to you.”
High over the gleaming roofs, the moon, a disk of yellow glass, swung out upon the indigo sky and peeped in at that window. One silver beam enveloped her. It bathed her lithe, firm figure; it touched her pure face, her scarlet lips; it made a refulgent glory of her hair, and, out of it, the splendor of her wonderful eyes was for him.
“Soon,” he whispered, “in the chapel of Ste. Jeanne D’Arc at the church of St. Germain des Prés.”
“Good-night,” she said.... “Good-night, my love.”