The next evening he waited for her. She was alone. With Byronic gloom he stood in front of her and said: "Annie!" She caught her breath and stepped back a pace. "Please," she said. "No! I thought you would understand." "I understand nothing," said Frederic; "nothing except that my life is miserable, wrecked, a thing of captivity and torture." "You mustn't come to see me. It isn't right. . . . Your . . ." "It is right," said Frederic. "It has all been wrong, but this is right." (He knew his language was stilted, but he could not give himself time to revise it.) Annie said simply: "Please, Mr. Frederic, it isn't any good. It was all over long ago. Your way and my way aren't the same." Frederic walked with her down the street, and found it hard to keep up with her, she went so swiftly. He made one last effort and said: "I want to see the child . . . Our own was . . ." Annie had heard about that from Serge. She turned to him and held out her hands: "I'm so sorry. . . . You shall see him just this once, if you'll promise me never to come again . . . and he is not to know who you are. He has never heard of you." The unconscious cruelty of her words did not penetrate Frederic's mind. The situation appealed to him as a situation. He was becoming a connoisseur, and the ironically bitter savour of this tickled his palate. With offensive humility and gratitude he said: "Thank you . . . Thank you." * * * The boy was in bed sleeping, with the clothes tumbled by his restlessness and his arms flung across his face. "He is such a good boy," said Annie; "he has always been good and happy." "He is like you," said Frederic. "I am glad I have seen him. I am glad to have found you again." "Will you go now?" Frederic was startled. Her simplicity and gentleness had sobered him. He had grown so used to swaggering from situation to situation that it was alarming to find this, which should have been the most touching and moving and the most honourable to himself, dissolved by the light touch of sincerity. It was all the more disconcerting, inasmuch as he had made no allowance for change in Annie. In their previous acquaintance she had been as adroit and as eager as he in the game of False Positions, which is the principal occupation of human beings all the world over. He had taken her rejection of his proffered assistance as another move in the game, and lo!--here she was simply ignoring the past and out of a purely general sort of friendliness allowing him to see her son, and when he had seen, requesting him to go! He was humiliated, but still so astonished that, though all his desire was to play upon her pity and so to drag her back to the old footing, he could not find words keen enough for his purpose. He heaved great sighs and fixed her with sorrowful and yearning eyes, but she gazed only at the child, busied herself with his bed, put up her hand to the gas jet and waited until Frederic was out of the room before she turned it low.