He stopped, for her eyes had fallen from his and rested on their clasped hands. He released her instantly.
“Good-by,” she said again.
“Good—— But surely I’m to see you once in a while!”
“I do not know.”
“Why, we’re neighbors! You can’t mean that you won’t let me——”
“I do not know,” she said. “Good-by.”
She went out, drawing-to the shattered door behind her.
Cartaret leaned against the panel and listened shamelessly.
He heard her cross the hall and open the door to the opposite room; he heard her suspiciously greeted by another voice—a voice that he gladly recognized as feminine—and in a language that was wholly unfamiliar to him: a language that sounded somehow Oriental. Then he heard the other door shut, and he turned to the comfortless gloom of his own quarters.
He sat down on the bed. He had forgotten a riotous dinner that was to have been his final Parisian folly, forgotten his poverty, forgotten his day of disappointment and his desire to go back to Ohio and the law. He remembered only the events of the last quarter-hour and the girl that had made them what they were.