"What are these things?" said Crabbe, fingering the parcels with a fretful note in his voice.
"Just some little presents, little trifles for her, Angeel. Nothing I cannot spare, Edmund. She belongs to me, after all. I shall never see her again, and I must not do less for her than for Maisie and Jack. You are coming with me? It is not worth while. I prefer to go alone, mon ami."
"Why not? A walk with you may keep me out of mischief, although with your theatrical friend mounting guard over Poussette I think I can promise you abstinence for the next few days."
Miss Clairville stopped in her brisk walk and searched his worn face.
"You are not well," she said suddenly, "you are not looking well."
He raised his arms, then dropped them with a kind of whimsical desperation. "How can I be well, or look well? My pride has suffered as well as my health. I'm ill, ashamed, and sorry. What'll we do, Pauline, if I can't keep sober?"
He had often said this to her, but never with such depth of sorrowful meaning as now.
"What shall we do, lady dear?" he repeated in a helpless, fretful murmur. "What shall we do?"
Her figure stiffened, she was again the tragic muse, the woman of the world with experience and authority behind her, and, woman-like, as he weakened, she grew stronger.
"You are not likely to," she cried with a fine encouraging gesture. "It is possible, I admit, but not probable. For you, Edmund, as well as for me, it is new places, new images, for the snows of this forlorn, this desolate, cold Canada; the boulevards of Paris, for the hermit's cell in the black funereal forest.—There goes your friend Martin now, voilà! B'jour, Martin."
"B'jour, mademoiselle!"