“We’ve got to be friends henceforth, Ephraim; if only for the child’s sake. Tell me.”
“It was only that I have never felt so dismally alone in my life, as I did in that crowded street.”
“And so you came back for me?”
“I came back for you,” he said with a smile.
“Let us go,” said Clementina, and she put her arm through his and they went out together and walked arm in arm like hundreds of other solemn couples in Marseilles.
“That better?” she asked after a while, with a humorous and pleasant sense of mothering this curiously pathetic and incomprehensible man.
The unfamiliar tone in her voice touched him.
“I had no idea you could be so kind, Clementina. Yesterday morning, when I was ill—I can scarcely remember—but I feel you were kind then.”
“I’m not always a rhinoceros,” said Clementina. “But what am I doing that’s kind now?”
He pressed her arm gently. “Just this,” said he.