Part 20 (1/2)

”Am I never to see you alone?” he asked.

She forsook the view of Paris to give him a second's glance. There was something roguish in it.

”Chitta,” she said, ”has not yet arrived.”

He felt himself a poor hand at love-making. Its language was upon his tongue--perhaps the slower now because he so much meant what he wanted to say. His jaw set, the lines at his mouth deepened.

”I've never thought much,” he blundered, ”about some of the things that most fellows think a lot about. I mean I've never--at least not till lately--thought much about love and--” he choked on the word--”and marriage; but----”

She cut him short. Her speech was slow and deliberate. Her eyes were on his, and in them he saw something at once firm and sad.

”Nor I, my friend,” she was saying: ”it is a subject that I am forbidden to think about.”

If she conveyed a command, he disobeyed it.

”Then,” he said, ”I wish you'd think about it now.”

”I am forbidden to think about it,” she continued, ”and I do not think about it because I shall not marry any one--at least not any one that--that I----”

Her voice dropped into silence. She turned from him to the sunset over the gray city.

Cartaret's exaltation left him more suddenly than it had come.

”Any one that you care for?” he asked in a lowered tone.

Still facing the city, she bowed a.s.sent.

”But, in Heaven's name, whom else should you marry except somebody that you care for?”

She did not answer.

”Look here,” urged Cartaret, ”you--you're not engaged, are you?”

She faced him then, still with that something at once firm and sad in her fine eyes.

”No,” she said; but he must have shown a little of the hope he found in that monosyllable, for she went on: ”Yet I shall never marry any one that I care for. That is all that I may tell you--my _friend_.”

As a hurrying tug puffs up to the liner that it is to tow safely into port, Chitta puffed up to her mistress. She met a Cartaret, could she have guessed it, as hopeless as she wanted him to be.

He did his best to put from him all desire to unravel the mystery, and for some days he was again content to remain Vitoria's unquestioning friend. She had told him that she could not marry him: nothing could have been plainer. What more could he gain by further enquiry? Did she mean that she loved somebody else whom she could not marry? Or did she mean that she loved, but could not marry--_him_? Cartaret highly resolved to take what good the G.o.ds provided: to remain her friend; to work on, in secret, for her comfort, and to be as happy as he could in so much of her companions.h.i.+p as she permitted him. He would never tell her that he loved her.

And then, very early on an evening in May, Destiny, who had been somnolent under the soft influence of Spring, awoke and once more took a hand in Cartaret's affairs and those of the Lady of the Rose.

Cartaret had just returned from a mission to Lepoittevin's shop and, having there disposed of a particularly bad picture, had put money in his purse: Chitta was waiting on the stairs and accepted the bulk of his earnings with her usual bad grace. He went into his studio, leaving the door ajar. The cool breeze of the Spring twilight fluttered the curtains; it bore upward the laughter of the concierge's children, playing at diavolo in the garden; it brought the fainter notes of the hurdy-gurdy, grinding out its music somewhere farther down the street.

Somebody was tapping at the door.

”Who is it?” he called.

”It's--_I_,” came the answer, with the least perceptible pause before the p.r.o.noun. ”May I come in?”