She looked away from him, unseeing, down the long lounge, and her gloved hands unconsciously gripped each other hard; her bosom heaved. In the woman’s dark soul strange things were happening, a curious, desperate hope was dawning. She remained like this for a few moments while Huckaby, unconscious of tensity, selected and lit a cigarette. “No, I shan’t go to London,” she said at last, without turning her head. “I’ll stay in Paris. I owe myself a holiday.” Ten minutes afterwards Quixtus had gone. They watched the wheels of the taxi that was carrying him to the Lyons station disappear beneath the great archway, and, with something like a sigh, they returned slowly to the lounge. Lena Fontaine threw herself on a seat, her hands by her side, in an attitude of weariness. “Oh God, I’m tired,” she whispered. Huckaby suggested bed. She shrugged her shoulders. It was not her body that was tired, she explained, but the ridiculous something that people called a soul. That was dead beat. She looked up at him as he stood before her wondering to hear her talk so frankly. “What was it that played the devil with you? A woman?” “Drink,” replied Huckaby laconically. “I hadn’t even that excuse,” said Lena Fontaine. She laughed mirthlessly. “Don’t you wish you were good?” He sat down by her side. “Why shouldn’t we try to be?” “Because the world isn’t a Sunday School, my dear friend.” Huckaby ventured to touch her hand with the tip of his finger. “Let us try,” said he. She smiled—this time only in half derision. “Let us,” she said. A great silence fell upon them, and they sat there side by side for a long, long time, pretending to watch, like many other couples and groups in the lounge, the shifting life of the great hotel, but really far away from it all, feeling drawn together in their new-found shame like two dreary souls who had escaped from Purgatory and were wandering through darkness they knew not whither. CHAPTER XVI