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“There is only one thinkable pretext for detaining you: it is that I may still show my sense of what you have done for me.”

Madame de Treymes, who had moved toward the door, paused at this and faced him, resting her thin brown hands on a slender sofa-back.

“How do you propose to show that sense?” she enquired.

Durham coloured still more deeply: he saw that she was determined to save her pride by making what he had to say of the utmost difficulty. Well! he would let his expiation take that form, then–it was as if her slender hands held out to him the fool’s cap he was condemned to press down on his own ears.

“By offering in return–in any form, and to the utmost–any service you are forgiving enough to ask of me.”

She received this with a low sound of laughter that scarcely rose to her lips. “You are princely. But, my dear sir, does it not occur to you that I may, meanwhile, have taken my own way of repaying myself for any service I have been fortunate enough to render you?”

Durham, at the question, or still more, perhaps, at the tone in which it was put, felt, through his compunction, a vague faint chill of apprehension. Was she threatening him or only mocking him? Or was this barbed swiftness of retort only the wounded creature’s way of defending the privacy of her own pain? He looked at her again, and read his answer in the last conjecture.

“I don’t know how you can have repaid yourself for anything so disinterested–but I am sure, at least, that you have given me no chance of recognizing, ever so slightly, what you have done.”

She shook her head, with the flicker of a smile on her melancholy lips. “Don’t be too sure! You have given me a chance and I have taken it–taken it to the full. So fully,” she continued, keeping her eyes fixed on his, “that if I were to accept any farther service you might choose to offer, I should simply be robbing you–robbing you shamelessly.” She paused, and added in an undefinable voice: “I was entitled, wasn’t I, to take something in return for the service I had the happiness of doing you?”

Durham could not tell whether the irony of her tone was self-directed or addressed to himself–perhaps it comprehended them both. At any rate, he chose to overlook his own share in it in replying earnestly: “So much so, that I can’t see how you can have left me nothing to add to what you say you have taken.”

“Ah, but you don’t know what that is!” She continued to smile, elusively, ambiguously. “And what’s more, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“How do you know?” he rejoined.

“You didn’t believe me once before; and this is so much more incredible.”

He took the taunt full in the face. “I shall go away unhappy unless you tell me–but then perhaps I have deserved to,” he confessed.

She shook her head again, advancing toward the door with the evident intention of bringing their conference to a close; but on the threshold she paused to launch her reply.

“I can’t send you away unhappy, since it is in the contemplation of your happiness that I have found my reward.”

IX

The next day Durham left with his family for England, with the intention of not returning till after the divorce should have been pronounced in September.

To say that he left with a quiet heart would be to overstate the case: the fact that he could not communicate to Madame de Malrive the substance of his talk with her sister-in-law still hung upon him uneasily. But of definite apprehensions the lapse of time gradually freed him, and Madame de Malrive’s letters, addressed more frequently to his mother and sisters than to himself, reflected, in their reassuring serenity, the undisturbed course of events.

There was to Durham something peculiarly touching–as of an involuntary confession of almost unbearable loneliness–in the way she had regained, with her re-entry into the clear air of American associations, her own fresh trustfulness of view. Once she had accustomed herself to the surprise of finding her divorce unopposed, she had been, as it now seemed to Durham, in almost too great haste to renounce the habit of weighing motives and calculating chances. It was as though her coming liberation had already freed her from the garb of a mental slavery, as though she could not too soon or too conspicuously cast off the ugly badge of suspicion. The fact that Durham’s cleverness had achieved so easy a victory over forces apparently impregnable, merely raised her estimate of that cleverness to the point of letting her feel that she could rest in it without farther demur. He had even noticed in her, during his few hours in Paris, a tendency to reproach herself for her lack of charity, and a desire, almost as fervent as his own, to expiate it by exaggerated recognition of the disinterestedness of her opponents–if opponents they could still be called. This sudden change in her attitude was peculiarly moving to Durham. He knew she would hazard herself lightly enough wherever her heart called her; but that, with the precious freight of her child’s future weighing her down, she should commit herself so blindly to his hand stirred in him the depths of tenderness. Indeed, had the actual course of events been less auspiciously regular, Madame de Malrive’s confidence would have gone far toward unsettling his own; but with the process of law going on unimpeded, and the other side making no sign of open or covert resistance, the fresh air of good faith gradually swept through the inmost recesses of his distrust.