THE long, hot, rushing hours had passed, for Damier, in a sort of stupor, the anÆsthesia of one fixed idea. In the stuffy railway-carriage, his eyes on the dark square of the open window, where one saw vaguely the starlit depths of a midsummer night, he thought, with the odd detachment of a crisis, of the past day: the sunny morning walk with Claire—green leaves, purple shadows; the afternoon’s supreme moment—a deep pulse of wonder in his heart, hardly to be seen in images; Lady Surfex among the palms and monstrous gilded pottery of the hotel salon; Monsieur Daunay’s quiet, white face; the crowded Paris railway-station, and the glimpse he had caught in it of Claire and Lord Epsil. This most recent impression was also the most vivid, threw all the others into a blurred background where, with a new look of woe, only Madame Vicaud’s face glimmered clearly.

The enforced pause at the height of his resolution made both the past and the future half illusory. The present, with not its usual flashing impermanence, had, for hours, been the same, had stopped, as it were, at an instant of vigilant alertness, and held him in it rigidly. Until the object of that vigilance, that alertness, were attained, he could not look forward or make projects. The chance for seeing Claire alone could not come, probably, until Dinard was reached. There, in the hurry of arrival, he might snatch a word with her. It would only be necessary to speak the word, to put the alternative before her. Entreaty would be useless; all the argument possible was the chink of gold in two hands; all the hope, that his chink might be the louder.

Shortly after ten o’clock the train drew up in the Rennes station. Damier had let no such opportunity escape him, and he again stepped from his compartment and stood looking toward the part of the train where he knew were Claire and her cavalier. As he looked he saw the tall figure of the Englishman stroll across the platform to the refreshment-buffet. The light fell full on his long, smooth, pink face,—a papier-mÂchÉ pink,—on his long, high nose and whity-brown mustache. Damier darted forward. In an instant he was at the door, still ajar, of the compartment that Lord Epsil had just left. He saw, under the yellow glare of the lamp, a confusion of traveling-bags, rugs, bandboxes (Claire had evidently shopped), newspapers and magazines; a large box of bonbons lay on a seat, its contents half rifled, its papers strewing the floor; and, settled back in a corner, her shoulders huddled together in a graceful sleepiness, was Claire. A long silk traveling-cloak fell over her white dress; the winged white hat of the morning was pushed a little to one side as her head leaned against the cushioned carriage; a drooping curve of loosened hair, shining in the light like molten brass, fell over her cheek and neck; her profile, half hidden, was at once petulant and relaxed with drowsiness.

Damier did not hesitate. He sprang into the carriage. Not touching the girl, he leaned over her. “Claire,” he said.

In an instant she had started into erectness, staring stupefied, too stupefied for shame or anger.

“I have only a moment,” said Damier, speaking with a clear-cut dryness of utterance. “If you will come back with me, and marry Monsieur Daunay,—he knows all and will marry you,—half of my income is yours for life.”

After the first stare she had blinked in opening her eyes to the light and to the sudden apparition; the eyes were now fixed widely on him; they looked like two deep, black holes.

“It is a bribe,” she said.

“Call it so if you will.”

“It shows your scorn for me.”

“Comprehension of you, rather.”

“And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t I will challenge this man—and fight him. I am an excellent fencer, an excellent shot.”

She looked at him, half scoffing, yet half believing. “Englishmen don’t fight duels.”

“This one will.”

“He might kill you.”

“I might kill him; you would have to take the risk.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Bien! I understand, too. I will fulfil myself.” She half rose, then sank again. “How much?” He mentioned the sum—not a small one. “Make it two thirds,” said Claire, keeping her dilated eyes upon him with an effect of final and defiant revelation.

“Two thirds, then,” he assented, in the steadied voice of one who does not dare hurry indecision. Yet, even now, she did not rise.

“One more condition, please. I do not see my mother again. Let us say, if you like, that I am ashamed to meet her.”

“She has not been told—of this.”

“Yes, she has,” said Claire. “I wrote and told her.” There was the satisfaction of achievement in the way she said it. “Oh, yes; she knows.”

“Yet, even after that,—your vengeance, I suppose,—I hardly dare make the promise for her,—she can forgive—even this.”

“Ah,” and the hoarse note was in Claire’s voice, “but I can’t take forgiveness from her. I have left the world where such episodes as this need forgiveness. Tolerance is now all that I will endure—and she will never tolerate. No; I will not come with you; I will not return to Monsieur Daunay and to respectability—unless you promise that I shall never see her again.”

“I promise it, then, if it is the condition.”

“You accept? Bien!” Claire sprang up, and ripping an illustration from a magazine, she scribbled on the blank back, “Have decided, after all, that I won’t come,” transfixed it with a hat-pin to the cushioned back of Lord Epsil’s vacated seat, then, as rapidly, reached for two of the bandboxes, pulled them, rattling, from the racks, stooped and jerked a large pasteboard box from under a seat, and, encumbered as she already was, caught up from among the rugs and bags several smaller packages, dexterously holding them to her sides with her elbows.

Damier, who had stared, hardly comprehending, gripped her wrist. “Put them down.” She gazed round in sincere amazement; then, with quite a humorous laugh, dropped the booty. “I really forgot! No, it wouldn’t be fair play, would it?—though, I confess, I should like to take a little vengeance; he has irritated me, been too complacent, too assured. This, too?” She touched the silk traveling-cloak. Damier, without speaking, stripped it off her; then, catching her by the arm, he almost dragged her from the carriage, for her feet stumbled among the dressing-cases and the abandoned boxes.

He found, as they almost ran along the dim platform across to the one opposite, and as he pushed her into a compartment of the Paris train that stood there, that she was laughing. The adventure of it, the excitement, Lord Epsil’s discomfiture, appealed, evidently, to her sense of mirth.

There were other occupants of the carriage, and Damier was thankful for it. He did not want to talk to Claire. To reproach her would make him as ridiculous as beating a tin pan in the expectation of response other than a mocking cachinnation; not to reproach might seem to condone by comprehension. Yet, as she sank back into a corner, settled her shoulder in it, he saw that there was emotion under the laughter, that it was not only the tin-pan rattle. He could interpret it as almost a regret—a regret for something against which she had always rebelled, from which she had now finally freed herself, a sudden realization that forever she had lost the standing upon which he had found her. Yet, over this trace of emotion and suffering, that, to Damier, was more piteous than anything he had yet seen in her, she smiled at him, with half-dropped lids. It was the look, with her a new one, of brazening a shame. Already her nature had retaliated upon the wrong she had done it by fixing in her face a more apparent ugliness of expression. She glanced round at the sleepy, respectable occupants of the carriage, their sleepiness, however, keeping an eye upon this startling young person in her white dress.

“Before we relapse into an irrevocable silence,” she said, “let me inform you—it will complete your evil opinion of me—that I didn’t really care about him; I cared for his caring about me—though at moments even that fatigued me, il m’embÊtait quelquefois; but then, I was glad to be revenged.”

“Upon whom? For what?”

“Upon you both—for making me feel that I was not of your world.”

“We did not make you feel it, Claire.”

For some moments they were silent, as the train moved slowly from the station, and then she said:

“Where will you take me?”

“To his cousin’s, Mademoiselle Daunay’s. I have arranged all with him.”

A look, almost tremulous under its attempt at a light sneer, crossed her face.

“What forgiveness! Il est un peu lÂche, vous savez.”

“Try, Claire, to deserve such touching lÂchetÉ.”

Again Claire was, for some moments, silent; then, yawning slightly, yet, again his acuteness guessed, affectedly, she said, settling her shoulder more decisively in her corner:

“There is the more hope for my deserving it since now I am rich. You may make your mind easy about my future. I have got all that I ever really wanted.” It was the new and brazen note over the new shame; but as he looked at the face that first pretended to sleep, and that eventually did sleep, was not the brass the curious, anomalous shield that nature put around something growing—around a soul that at last, with a faint, half-conscious thrill, felt upon it the awakening breath of suffering?