the grey
sky-line of the Faubourg, shining in the splintered radiance of the
sunset beyond the long sweep of the quays. "They are a part of me--I
belong to them. I must go back to them!" she sighed.

She rose slowly to her feet, as though her metaphor had expressed an
actual fact and she felt herself bodily drawn from his side by the
influences of which she spoke.

Durham had risen too. "Then I go back with you!" he exclaimed
energetically; and as she paused, wavering a little under the shock
of his resolve: "I don't mean into your house--but into your life!"
he said.

She suffered him, at any rate, to accompany her to the door of the
house, and allowed their debate to prolong itself through the almost
monastic quiet of the quarter which led thither. On the way, he
succeeded in wresting from her the confession that, if it were
possible to ascertain in advance that her husband's family would not
oppose her action, she might decide to apply for a divorce. Short of
a positive assurance on this point, she made it clear that she would
never move in the matter; there must be no scandal, no _retentissement_,
nothing which her boy, necessarily brought up in the French tradition
of scrupulously preserved appearances, could afterward regard as the
faintest blur on his much-quartered escutcheon. But even this partial
concession again raised fresh obstacles; for there seemed to be no
one to whom she could entrust so delicate an investigation, and to
apply directly to the Marquis de Malrive or his relatives appeared,
in the light of her past experience, the last way of learning their
intentions.

"But," Durham objected, beginning to suspect a morbid fixity of idea
in her perpetual attitude of distrust--"but surely you have told me
that your husband's sister--what is her name? Madame de
Treymes?--was the most powerful member of the group, and that she
has always been on your side."

She hesitated. "Yes, Christiane has been on my side. She dislikes
her brother. But it would not do to ask her."

"But could no one else ask her? Who are her friends?"

"She has a great many; and some, of course, are mine. But in a case
like this they would be all hers; they wouldn't hesitate a moment
between us."

"Why should it be necessary to hesitate between you? Suppose Madame
de Treymes sees the reasonableness of what you ask; suppose, at any
rate, she sees the hopelessness of opposing you? Why should she make
a mystery of your opinion?"