At half-past six on the following morning, the porter came to convey his luggage to the diligence, which starts from the Grand Quai, and a little later he himself left the house. He did so very wistfully. His quixotic flight caused him a greater pang even than he had anticipated. In the street he could not forbear giving a regretful glance upwards at the pension. To his delight, Katherine was standing on the little balcony outside her window.
The bright morning sunlight fell upon her. She was wearing a cream-coloured wrapper; a pale blue scarf about her head half covered her fair hair. Seen through the clear, pure atmosphere, she looked the incarnation of the morning. Her face flushed red all over, as she met the gladness in his eyes. She had risen early, unable to sleep; had dressed herself with elaborate care, searching earnestly in her glass for the accusing lines of her thirty years. She would send a note, she had thought, by the waiter who would bring up his coffee, saying that she was astir and could see him in the salon before he started. But she had only got as far as biting the end of a pencil before a blank sheet of paper. All her preparations and fluttering of heart had ended in her going on to the balcony, to see him walk twenty yards before he turned the corner of the street. And there she had wished tremulously against her will that he would look up as he crossed the road. He had done so, was standing below her. She blushed like a young girl. But he only stood for a moment. With an eager sign he motioned her inwards, and ran back to the house.
They met outside the salon door. He rushed up to her, a little breathless from his race up the stairs, and drew her with him into the room.
“You—up at this hour—just to see me start!—are you an angel?”
He was rapturously incoherent. Her act seemed to him to be truly angelic. In the early stages of love a man rarely takes the woman's passionate cravings into account. Acts that proceed from desires as self-centred as his own he puts down to pure, selfless graciousness towards him. And perhaps as a general principle this is just as well. The woman loves the tribute; and one of her fairest virtues is none the less fair through being won under false pretences.
Katherine looked up at him with strange shyness. He had the power of evoking that which was sweetest and most womanly in her.
“You see that I do care—greatly.”
His arms were about her before the soundwave had passed his ear. A flood of burning words burst impatiently from his lips. She leant back her head, in the joy of surrender.
“I have loved you from the first—since last Christmas. You came to me as nothing else has ever come to me—brave and strong above all men.”
The words fell from her in a murmur strung to passion-pitch. One such radiant moment eclipsed the waste of grey years. She would have sold her soul for it.