"Yes."
He took up his hat and stick and prepared to go.
"Eh bien," she retorted, "that is a challenge. You have found something to occupy me. Adieu. Take care that my room faces the cathedral."
II.
Someone had gone out by the stage-door and the noise of the storm came in along the low passage. The theatre was almost in darkness. Only Monsieur Raoul and old Jacques Martin were there. In the shadow, as he bent over his violin case, the younger man seemed tall and well-made; but when he stood up, though he was tall, his bent shoulders became apparent, and the light fell on a stern, pale face that seemed older than its thirty years. He began to button his cloak around him.
"You might tell ma femme, Monsieur Raoul, that I shall be late. I must prepare for to-morrow."
The old man and his wife kept house for Raoul, who was a bachelor.
"Assuredly I will tell her." Then Raoul went away.
The rain had ceased, but the scream of the wind sounded again and again. The thin, weather-beaten trees bent low, like reeds; and heavy clouds, suffused with moonlight, drove inland in rugged broken masses.
For a few moments Jacques lingered on; then he put out the lights, locked up, drew his coat closer round his spare body, and hurried across to the more cheerful shelter of the Café des Artistes.