e people were all a picture together, a picture that, when they
went down to the wide sands, shimmered, in a thousand tints, with the
pretty organisation of the _plage_, with the gaiety of spectators and
bathers, with that of the language and the weather, and above all with
that of our young lady's unprecedented situation. For it appeared to her
that no one since the beginning of time could have had such an adventure
or, in an hour, so much experience; as a sequel to which she only
needed, in order to feel with conscious wonder how the past was changed,
to hear Susan, inscrutably aggravated, express a preference for the
Edgware Road. The past was so changed and the circle it had formed
already so overstepped that on that very afternoon, in the course of
another walk, she found herself enquiring of Sir Claude--without a
single scruple--if he were prepared as yet to name the moment at which
they should start for Paris. His answer, it must be said, gave her the
least little chill.

"Oh Paris, my dear child--I don't quite know about Paris!"

This required to be met, but it was much less to challenge him than for
the rich joy of her first discussion of the details of a tour that,
after looking at him a minute, she replied: "Well, isn't that the REAL
thing, the thing that when one does come abroad--?"

He had turned grave again, and she merely threw that out: it was a way
of doing justice to the seriousness of their life. She couldn't moreover
be so much older since yesterday without reflecting that if by this time
she probed a little he would recognise that she had done enough for mere
patience. There was in fact something in his eyes that suddenly, to her
own, made her discretion shabby. Before she could remedy this he had
answered her last question, answered it in the way that, of all ways,
she had least expected. "The thing it doesn't do not to do? Certainly
Paris is charming. But, my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off. I mean
it's so beastly expensive."

That note gave her a pang--it suddenly let in a harder light. Were they
poor then, that is was HE poor, really poor beyond the pleasantry of
apollinaris and cold beef? They had walked to the end of the long jetty
that enclosed the harbour and were looking out at the dangers they had
escaped, the grey horizon that was England, the tumbled surface of the
sea and the brown smacks that bobbed upon it. Why had he chosen an
embarrassed time to make this foreign dash? unl