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.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III THEY left the ramparts and returned to the hotel. She left him in the hall for a moment, and then returned, and asked him to follow her. He followed her to a door on the first floor landing; she opened it, and led him into a sitting-room, where in an armchair beside a blazing wood fire sat old Madame de Warens muffled up in a light shawl, with a novel open upon her lap, asleep. It was no ordinary hotel sitting-room, this daintily upholstered room. It had, in fact, been entirely redecorated by a Parisian firm three years before, when the two women had decided to take up their quarters for good at the hotel. The old lady by the fire awoke with a start when she heard them enter, welcomed Hellier with a little old-fashioned bow, and relapsed into her chair, whilst the girl, laying her gloves, which she had drawn off, upon the table, went to a door leading into another room, opened it, and motioned the young man to follow her. He followed her into a bedroom. A woman’s bedroom. On the dressing-table lay silver hair brushes and all the odds and ends of a woman’s toilet, the little bed stood virginal-looking and white as snow, a row of tiny boots and shoes stood by one wall. On a table, in a corner near the bed, stood something dismal and dark.