"What
an evening!"
"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
"But you've given up the car."
"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again!
And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the
key!"
He gave her the key.
"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come
in hang the key on the nail in the office."
Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the
Rue de Cleves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would
have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started
on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed
excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil
their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him
as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance
from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in
which to fight with her disinclination.
"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I
can't tell him in the street!"
For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the
_concierge_ watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched
the town.
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