At the lower end of the park they sat down, near a little building hidden behind maples and privet, where the fishing nets and oars of the boats were kept. From their seat they looked across the sloping lawns and the plantations and shrubberies showing patches of gold. The castle, seen in the background, with its long array of closed windows and deserted terraces, lifting its towers and turrets proudly to the sky, seemed withdrawn, as it were, into the past, and grander than ever. ‘I am sorry to leave all that,’ said Paul, with a sigh. She looked at him in amazement with storm in her knitted brows. Go away? Did he mean to go away? Why? ‘No help. Such is life.’ ‘Are we to part? And what is to become of me?--and the journey we were to make together?’ ‘I could not interrupt you----’ he said. But how could a poor artist like him afford himself a journey to Palestine? It was an impossible dream, like Védrine’s dahabeeah ending in a punt on the Loire. She shrugged her aristocratic shoulders, and said, ‘Why, Paul, what nonsense! You know that all I have is yours.’ ‘Mine? By what right?’ It was out! But she did not see yet what he was driving at. Fearing that he had gone too far, he added, ‘I mean, what right, in the prejudiced view of society, shall I have to travel with you?’ ‘Well then, we will stay at Mousseaux.’ He made her a little mocking bow as he said, ‘Your architect has finished his work on the castle.’ ‘Oh, we will find him something to do, if I have to set fire to it to-night!’ She laughed her open-hearted tender laugh, leant against him, and taking his hands pressed them against her cheeks--fond trifling this, not the word which he was waiting for, and trying to make her say. Then he burst out, ‘If you love me, Antonia, let me go. I must make a living for myself and mine. Society would not forgive my living on the bounty of a woman who is not and never will be my wife.’ She understood, and closed her eyes as if on the brink of an abyss. In the long silence that followed was heard all over the park the falling of the leaves in the breeze, some still heavy with sap, dropping in bunches from bough to bough, others stealing down with a scarcely audible sound, like the rustling of a dress. Round the little hut, under the maples, it was more like the pattering footsteps of some voiceless crowd which moved around. She rose with a shiver. ‘It is cold; let us go in.’ She had made her sacrifice. It would kill her, very probably, but the world should not see the degradation of the Duchess Padovani into Madame Paul Astier, who had married her architect.