d by a wan old waiter
with the look of a castaway who has given up watching for a sail...It
was odd how the waiter's face came back to him...

Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened; but what was
the use of thinking of that now? He tried to turn his thoughts to more
urgent issues; but, by a strange perversity of association, every detail
of the day was forcing itself on his mind with an insistence from which
there was no escape. Reluctantly he relived the long wet walk back
to the hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the
Boulevard. It was still raining when they withdrew from this stale
spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even,
on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of
shop-windows and poking into draughty passages, and finally, when they
had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that
they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre
at the Batignolles. But at that he had somewhat irritably protested: he
remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable,
and vaguely disposed to resist one another's suggestions. His feet
were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick of the smell of stuffy
unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some
letters--and so they had kept on to the hotel...

XXVII

Darrow had no idea how long he had sat there when he heard Anna's hand
on the door. The effort of rising, and of composing his face to meet
her, gave him a factitious sense of self-control. He said to himself: "I
must decide on something----" and that lifted him a hair's breadth above
the whirling waters.

She came in with a lighter step, and he instantly perceived that
something unforeseen and reassuring had happened.

"She's been with me. She came and found me on the terrace. We've had a
long talk and she's explained everything. I feel as if I'd never known
her before!"

Her voice was so moved and tender that it checked his start of
apprehension.

"She's explained----?"

"It's natural, isn't it, that she should have felt a little sore at the
kind of inspection she's been subjected to? Oh, not from you--I don't
mean that! But Madame de Chantelle's opposition--and her sending for
Adelaide Painter! She told me frankly she didn't care to owe her husband
to Adelaide Painter...She thinks now that her annoyance at feeling
herself so talked over and