CHAPTER II

HE came through the town and up the Grand Rue.

When he reached the ramparts he took a seat, despite the nipping east wind.

He looked at his watch.

Just about this hour every day it was the custom of Madame de Warens and her niece to take a walk on the ramparts.

It seemed the only fixed thing, except meals, in their desolate lives, this walk every day on the ramparts.

Hellier would meet them there. It was a sort of tacit appointment. No person, unless they were curiously blind, could fail to see that it was a rendezvous. The women came and the young man came and walked with them up and down on this desolate place for half an hour or so, talked about everything and nothing, returning to the hotel where he left them, perhaps not to see them again till the following day.

This afternoon they were late. Hellier looked at his watch again, it was ten minutes past the time of the usual meeting. He was rising to return, with a desolate feeling at the heart, when, far off, coming towards him, he saw the figure of a girl. It was Mademoiselle Lefarge, and she was alone!

“My aunt was afraid of the east wind,” said the girl. “I came because I thought you possibly might be here and waiting for us; we have got so into the habit of meeting you that really it was like an appointment—your society in this desolate place has become quite one of our pleasures,” she said, “and it is bad to keep a friend who has given one pleasure waiting in the cold east wind.”

This was plunging into the middle of things; she spoke with the slightest foreign accent, and Hellier, an Englishman used to the convention-bound female, could not find words, or thoughts, to reply to her with for a moment.

It was not an awkward silence. They paused for a moment and looked over the rampart wall at the peaceful country, just tinged by the early spring, trees and fields, belfries and far-off hamlets, all under a sky sad coloured and beautiful, like that sky which dwells for ever over the “Avenue near Middleharnis.”

As they gazed, without speaking, the man was telling the woman that he loved her, and the woman was telling the man that she cared for him.

It came quite naturally, when he took her hand and held it.

“I have wanted to tell you for a long time,” he said.

She sighed, but she let him hold her hand.

Then she said, as if in answer to some question.

“It can never be.”

“I love you,” he said, speaking in a plain, matter-of-fact tone, that would have told little to a stander-by of the passion that was consuming him. “You have come into my life suddenly, and if I lose you, if you leave me, I will be for ever desolate—dear friend.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“It can never be.”

There was a fatality, a hopelessness in her voice, that told him that these words were no idle woman’s words. It could never be. Never could he hold her in his arms as his own, never possess her. Paradise lay before him, yet he could never enter in.

“Why?”

“Come,” said she, “and I will show you.”