At six in the morning he was to be at the station--the next morning but one. The train reaches Rouen at an earlier hour now, but the service was a tidal one twenty years ago. When she had scanned the letter neither of them spoke for--it seemed a long time to him. They had crossed the road into the Solférino Garden, and he stood beside her with his hands thrust in his jacket pockets, staring at the little lake. "So we shall soon be saying 'good-bye,'" she said at last. He nodded miserably. "To-morrow evening about nine o'clock," he said. "Why so early?" "Have you forgotten you're going to a dance with Miss McGuire to-morrow night? _I_ didn't forget; I thought of it directly I saw the date. What time shall you begin to dress?" "You don't know me very well, Con, after all," she murmured. His heart leapt; he pretended not to understand what she meant. "Don't I?" he asked; "why not?" "How could you think I'd go out on your last night here?" she answered. "You won't go? ... Oh, Mrs. Adaile!" And as they moved away under the horse-chestnut blossom, it was less dreadful to him that he was going to leave her. Why did she do it? It could not have been to test her power over him; it could not have been to wound him wantonly. Who shall say why she did it! A woman is often unable to define her motive to herself. Two men came into the hotel after dinner--acquaintances both--and she became engrossed by them, and sent up little peals of laughter, and seemed to like their admiration, which was presumptuously barefaced. He sat tongue-tied in a corner, unwittingly providing equal entertainment for other women in the room. Though she knew he was suffering, she threw no glance to him. And that evening the boy entered on another stage--the stage of jealousy. The fires of jealousy are always horrible, and there is none they ravage more fiercely than the lad whose torture the world finds comic. There is none, because no man, nor woman, nor young girl in such a pass, is so totally defenceless as a lad; to none other than a lad, when his love is outraged, does nature forbid even the resource of simulated dignity. His torments are intensified by the knowledge of his ineptitude. Always present is the thought that he ought to adopt an attitude which he is too raw to discover, and he is prostrated in perceiving that beside his glib rival he looks ridiculous and a lout.