Artists -- Fiction; British -- France -- Paris -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"I see your aunt," he said hurriedly. "Are you going to send me away
like this? Don't be so unjust, so ungenerous. It's not like you--my
pupil of last Spring was not unjust."
"Your pupil of last Spring was a child and a duffer, Mr. Vernon, as I
said before. But she is grateful to you for one thing--no, two."
"What's the other?" he asked swiftly.
"Your drawing-lessons," she demurely answered.
"Then what's the one?"
"Good-bye," she said, and went down the steps to meet her aunt. He
effaced himself behind a pillar. In spite of her new coldness, he
could not believe that she would tell her aunt of the meeting. And he
was right, though Betty's reasons were not his reasons.
"What's the good?" she asked herself as she and her aunt walked across
to their hotel. "He's going away to-morrow, and I shall never see him
again. Well, I behaved beautifully, that's one thing. He must simply
loathe me. So that's all right! If he were staying on in Paris, of
course I would tell her."
She believed this fully.
He waited five minutes behind that pillar, and then had himself driven
to the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, choosing as driver a man with a
white hat, in strict accordance with the advice in Baedeker, though he
had never read any of the works of that author.
This new Betty, with the smart gown and the distant manner, awoke at
the same time that she contradicted his memories of the Betty of Long
Barton. And he should not see her again. Of course he was not going to
Vienna, but neither was he going to hang round the Hotel Bête, or to
bribe Franz or Elise to smuggle notes to Miss Betty.
"It's never any use trying to join things on again," he told himself.
"As well try to mend a spider's web when you have put your boot
through it."
'No diver brings up love again
Dropped once
In such cold seas!'
"But what has happened? Why does she hate me so? You acted very
nicely, dear, but that wasn't indifference. It was hatred, if ever
I've seen it. I wonder what it means? Another lover? No--then she'd be
sorry for me. It's something that belongs to me--not another man's
shadow. But what I shall never know. And she's prettier than ever,
too. Oh, hang it!"
His key turned in the lock, and on the door-mat shewed the white
square of an envelope--a note from the other woman, the one whose
profile he had not remembered. She was in Paris for a time. She had
seen him at the Paix, had wondered whether he had his old rooms, had
driven straight up on the chance of being able to leave this--wasn't
that devotion?--and would he care to call for her at eight and they
could dine somewhere and talk over old times? One familiar initial,
that of her first name, curled in the corner and the card smelt of
jasmine--not of jasmine-scent in bottles, but of the real flower. He
had never known how she managed it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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