ent back
to his seat, and they looked at each other like lovers smiling at a
happy secret.

Anna, before going back to Givre, had suggested Owen's moving into her
apartment, but he had preferred to remain at the hotel to which he had
sent his luggage, and on arriving in Paris she decided to drive there at
once. She was impatient to have the meeting over, and glad that Darrow
was obliged to leave her at the station in order to look up a colleague
at the Embassy. She dreaded his seeing Owen again, and yet dared not
tell him so, and to ensure his remaining away she mentioned an urgent
engagement with her dress-maker and a long list of commissions to be
executed for Madame de Chantelle.

"I shall see you to-morrow morning," she said; but he replied with a
smile that he would certainly find time to come to her for a moment on
his way back from meeting the Ambassador; and when he had put her in a
cab he leaned through the window to press his lips to hers.

She blushed like a girl, thinking, half vexed, half happy: "Yesterday he
would not have done it..." and a dozen scarcely definable differences
in his look and manner seemed all at once to be summed up in the boyish
act. "After all, I'm engaged to him," she reflected, and then smiled
at the absurdity of the word. The next instant, with a pang of
self-reproach, she remembered Sophy Viner's cry: "I knew all the while
he didn't care..." "Poor thing, oh poor thing!" Anna murmured...

At Owen's hotel she waited in a tremor while the porter went in search
of him. Word was presently brought back that he was in his room and
begged her to come up, and as she crossed the hall she caught sight of
his portmanteaux lying on the floor, already labelled for departure.

Owen sat at a table writing, his back to the door; and when he stood up
the window was behind him, so that, in the rainy afternoon light, his
features were barely discernible.

"Dearest--so you're really off?" she said, hesitating a moment on the
threshold.

He pushed a chair forward, and they sat down, each waiting for the
other to speak. Finally she put some random question about his
travelling-companion, a slow shy meditative youth whom he had once or
twice brought down to Givre. She reflected that it was natural he should
have given this uncommunicative comrade the preference over his livelier
acquaintances, and aloud she said: "I'm so glad Fred Rempson can go with
you."

Owen answered in the same tone, and f