g son.

"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

"No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said--"

"Your mother?"

"Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone--you
remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would
be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you
most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes
remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the
window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."

"No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And
you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each
other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb
asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about
each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about
our own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me? If
you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's. I've got to
rush out to Versailles afterward."

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend
the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all
at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate
lifetime.

After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion. It
seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all,
some one had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been his
wife moved him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate
insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt, the
episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted
forces. But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a
bench in the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life
rolled by....

A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She had
never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years
before, she had made no change in her way of living. There was nothing
now to keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her.

He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries
gardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often went
there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place
where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an hour
or more he wandered from gallery t