His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him. The disclosure of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too late? A love as far removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as it was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more fearful shipwreck. Hilda's selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be dreaded than any hurt to himself. And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again. CHAPTER IX An April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd's return. A rather prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs. He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard's. Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the Captain's projected jaunt. He surmised that her father's absence would lighten Hilda's load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain's hands--on the understanding that most of it was to be given to Hilda--but _from_ her father, would relieve her from the necessity for teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed "_toujours souffrante_," and "Mademoiselle 'Ilda"--Odd had hesitated uncomfortably before asking for her--was out. "_Pas bien non plus, celle-là_," she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; "_Elle s'éreinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle_." With a sick sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she might be found. All the morning, it seemed "_Il faut bien qu'elle soigne madame, et puis elle m'aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop lourde_," and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that "_Madame est très, mais très exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une damê comme celle-là_."