beckoned to her nephew from the divan where she was seated alone.
“I have lost my mille,” she confided, with a tragic gesture. “It was most unfortunate. I followed Luke Cheyne, who had been winning heavily, and directly I put up my money he lost!”
“A mille,” Roger reminded her, “is not an irrecoverable sum.”
“It is as much as I permit myself to lose in an evening,” Lady Julia declared. “Everything is so expensive nowadays and the taxation is dreadful. Did I ever tell you about my protégée, Roger?”
“Not a word,” he replied.
“When I come to think of it, I haven’t had much chance, have I?” she went on. “Now I shall show her to you. She has only been here once before and she’s rather stupid about it. She prefers to go to bed early. Still, perhaps her profession—Here she comes! What do you think of her?”
Roger turned around. A girl was crossing the room towards them, accompanied by a voluble Frenchwoman, Madame Dumesnil, his aunt’s dame de compagnie. The latter was gesticulating and talking fast. The girl seemed scarcely to be listening. She was wearing a white dress—the fashion of the moment—designed by the cunning brain which knows how to glorify simplicity. She was without jewellery and her shining light brown hair had obviously never been touched by a coiffeur. Roger, who had known the savour of life during his last twelve months of voluntary exile, who had more than once found himself evenly balanced between life and death, felt in those few seconds such a thrill as he had not experienced since the night in his villa when he had thrown open his windows to the song of that lonely bird and the perfumes of the night. The habitude of crises, however, kept him motionless, notwithstanding his amazement. There was scarcely even gladness in his eyes.
“Jeannine,” Lady Julia said. “This is my nephew, Roger Sloane. Roger, I thought I wrote to you about my protégée, but if I didn’t, here she is. She’s a dear child but she must not be spoilt.”
Jeannine lifted her eyes. There was a gleam of subtle reminiscence in them.
“I do not think,” she said, “that Mr. Sloane will spoil me.”
“I expect he has forgotten what all you modern young women are like,” Lady Julia observed. “He has been away for a year killing wild animals—I can’t imagine why. It seems to me an incredibly brutal pastime. Madame Dumesnil, you remember my nephew? I am not very pleased with him because he suddenly deserted a charming villa here and went away without a word to any one last season. However, he is a nice lad. Sit down with me, Madame. My nephew will take Mademoiselle Jeannine for a promenade. In a quarter of an hour, Roger, please bring the child back.”
CHAPTER IV
The young people moved off together. Of the two, the little flower picker was by far the more composed. Roger scarcely recognised his own voice.
“I don’t understand this,” he said.
“If you choose, we will sit down somewhere,” she suggested.
They found a corner in the inner portion of the bar.
“I thought you knew everything,” she went on. “Your gouvernante, Madame Vinay—”
“I only arrived home to-day,” he explained. “I came by steamer from Egypt. Every mail lately has missed me. I was obliged to change my plans more than once.”
“I see,” she murmured. “Is it possible, perhaps, that you remember a night and the morning that followed when you suddenly tired of life in your villa and the flowers and of trying to write books, and decided to travel away with your strange friend and say good-bye to no one?”
“I remember,” he admitted.
“You may also remember that you left me in charge of Madame Vinay and the Curé. Madame Vinay will tell you that she could do nothing with me. I was, in fact, very troublesome. Then Madame had an inspiration. Flowers, it seemed, were the only things I cared for. Very well. She took me to a cousin of hers—a fleuriste in Nice. She found me a post there. I unpacked the boxes of flowers in the morning and I arranged them for the shop window. The people seemed pleased with what I did. We made much business. Then, one day a woman came in who was a famous dressmaker. She asked to see the person who arranged the colouring of the flowers and their grouping—Does this weary you?”
“Please go on,” he begged.
“You have shown so little interest,” she continued quietly, “that I thought perhaps—well, n’importe. She gave me a post in her dressmaking establishment in Monte Carlo and Madame and I moved in here. I pleased her. I do not know why, except that I did my best. Lady Julia is one of her valued clients and between them they have been almost too kind to me. My patronne permits me to come to these places with Lady Julia and Madame Dumesnil, to wear her frocks in the evening and I wear them at the establishment in the daytime. I am what is called a mannequin—a living peg upon which beautiful clothes are hung. The only thing is that it does not please me to be out very much in the evening. This is the first time for a long while. I asked to come to-night. I wanted to know whether you were real or only just a dream.”
“You knew who I was then?”
“I knew.”
“And with the rest of your life?”
“I study. I have learnt this little English I sometimes speak. I have learnt to make fewer mistakes in my own language. There are many things I have tried to teach myself. I have tried to understand the different ways people have of looking at life. For that I have read books and Lady Julia is very good. She talks to me.”
He was beginning to feel dazed.
“I see that you are no longer a child,” he ventured.
“Would that be possible?” she asked gravely. “I was always older than you thought me, but I still have not very much understanding outside my work. There is one thing which has been in my mind every moment since that great pain came in the early morning when I awoke.”
“Tell me about it, please,” he begged.
“I mean when you went away without a word. I did not understand. I do not understand. I think that I never shall understand. Why did you do that? Was it to hurt me? Were you afraid of anything?”
He looked at her long and searchingly. Her eyes met his without tremor or embarrassment. He suddenly realised that there were no words with which he could make her understand.
“I left because I was afraid,” he told her.
“Afraid—of me?”
“Of what might happen between you and me.”
“But you were my god,” she persisted. “No one had ever been kind to me before. You stood up against the man whom I hated, the devil who was filling my days with black terror, who but for your coming would probably have had his way with me and dragged me down into the mud. You carried me away to safety. You lifted me to heaven and then you snapped your fingers. Why?”
“I just can’t tell you that, Jeannine,” he answered. “There are some impulses and some thoughts behind them which don’t lend themselves to explanations. But believe one thing, please. I left because you were a child and I was afraid that I might forget.”
A softer look came into her face, a smile almost of happiness played upon her lips.
“You liked me?” she asked, with a queer little shyness.
“I think I might say that I loved you.”
“And yet you went. Men are not like that—such men as I have read and heard of. You did not mean to hurt me—”
“I went away for