The dumb and piteous appeal in his eyes--great, soft eyes, like a loving repulsed dog's--went to her heart, but what did it mean? Was he only sorry for himself, this great man-child, helpless before his own passions, or was the spring of real penitence touched at last? Did he want comforting exculpation and the assurance that his mother would never know half or grieve for a quarter, and that all would come right by some mysterious magic? Silently, with a gentle pressure, she slipped her hand into his arm; he pressed it hard against his throbbing side, with a deep, gasping breath, and drew her to a bench, set back in shining foliage outside the gardens fronting the sea, where they sat looking absently at sunlit sails dipping and gliding over the broad blueness, and listening absently to the continuous plunge and break of tumbling waves. He had been in quite other company that day, and was still tingling and throbbing with the sound of another voice and the excitement of a scene of sudden, unimagined passion, the thought of which made him press the hand in his own more convulsively to his side, as if it had power to save him, like a frightened child clinging to a mother. It had come so suddenly. He had been loitering drearily in the Casino gardens in the forenoon to kill time till the appointed meeting at Mentone, loitering by a hedge of prickly pear, its bare, bone-like stems and fleshly leaves spread like distorted hands, its dull-red, warty fruit, grotesquely suggestive of weird spells and horrible enchantments, when round the corner all at once he had come eye to eye with the Countess, solitary, sad and with a new, subdued gentleness in her manner. He must come in to her apartment, to the balcony looking on the gardens, he heard; she was alone; they must breakfast together; she was sure he had not breakfasted; they would have a bottle of that Clos Vougeot he had liked. The breakfast had been very cheerful and reviving--dainty cookery, a lively and warm-hearted hostess bent on pleasing, and afterwards an excellent and favourite cigar and a cup of coffee of unimaginable perfection. Such things soften the bitterness of affliction and bring people to contemplate misfortune in gentler mood and through rosier light. And in this cool, sumptuously fitted apartment by the balcony that looked on the gardens, it was pleasant to linger and laugh, forgetful of the thorns of life. And there and then the offer to square the Spider had been pressingly renewed and courteously declined. No man preyed upon women. But the woman this time was in luck; she could spare whatever was necessary to appease the cormorant; there was no question of preying on her.-- But men must stand or fall by themselves. No; he was cruel; he scorned her help; there were tears.