Still sobbing, and with her face hidden by one hand, she put out the other to him blindly. He did not dare to trust himself at that moment to take it, and it fell like a wounded bird to her side, so that they stood by each other in the big empty room without speaking, she weeping, and he, with his hands clenched, looking at her in torture and impotence. Perhaps it was the fact that her hand had not been taken which enabled Lucienne a little to command herself. And when her tear-blinded eyes rested on her lover, standing so near, but with so white and rigid a face, she recognised the futility of rebelling any more. It seemed to her that all her youth went from her in that moment, and that she was suddenly very old, very prudent, and did not care for anything very much, like the old Marquise de la Ferronière, her grandmother, who spent her days in a convent but was not a nun. So she sank down in the chair behind her, and, shutting her eyes, leant her head against the back, the better to taste this wisdom and detachment, and the sooner to forget Louis, whom henceforth she must never remember. Saint-Ermay bent hastily over her with an exclamation. She opened her eyes. “Say good-bye quickly. . . .” “I thought you had fainted!” “No,” said Lucienne, “I hardly ever——” She stopped, and a shiver of reminiscence ran through her. Ought she to tell him? But the remembrance was horrible and shameful; she could not. Louis saw that something was troubling her. “Does it matter?” he asked tenderly, kneeling down once more beside her. “There is only one thing that matters to me, Lucienne, and that is that I shall love you as long as I live. . . . But perhaps you had best forget that. . . . Good-bye, my darling.” The passionate kisses which he set on her hand woke on the instant in Lucienne that youth which she had felt slip from her—woke it to a last desperate revolt. “No . . . no, Louis,” she gasped in agony. “Not yet . . . a little longer. . . . It is too cruel. . . .” And for a moment longer his head remained bowed on her hand, while she looked down at it to imprint for ever in her mind all that she could see of him, till she felt that she could remember to eternity every rippling strand of his dark-brown hair, the dull black ribbon that tied it, the tiny curl by his ear, and the strong, delicate hand, emerging from the coarse and ruffleless sleeve, that had clenched itself on the other arm of the chair. But before she had made an end of gazing he got up from his knees, and, without a word, without a backward look, walked out of the room and shut the door behind him. CHAPTER XVII COMEDY OF A BURNT LETTER