the Library attendants think I am a
bona-fide reader. I go there to sleep because I have no other roof."

His French was entirely fluent, but the accent was American. Sylvia
looked up at him surprised. He returned her gaze dully, and without
another look at the papers, scuffled off through the rain, across the
street towards the Pantheon. His boots were lamentable.

Sylvia had an instantly vanishing memory of a pool of quiet sunshine,
of a ripely beautiful woman and a radiant young man. Before she knew
she was speaking, an impulsive cry had burst from her: "Why, Professor
Saunders! Professor Saunders! Don't you know me? I am Sylvia
Marshall!"

CHAPTER XXXIX

SYLVIA DRIFTS WITH THE MAJORITY

"No, they don't let you sit down in here if you're as shabby as I am,"
said the man, continuing his slow, feeble, shuffling progress. "They
know you're only a vagrant, here to get out of the rain. They won't
even let you stand still long."

Sylvia had not been inside the Pantheon before, had never been inside
a building with so great a dome. They stood under it now. She sent her
glance up to its vast, dim, noble heights and brought it down to the
saturnine, unsavory wreck at her side. She was regretting the impulse
which had made her call out to him. What could she say to him now they
were together? What word, what breath could be gentle enough, light
enough not to be poison to that open sore?

On his part he seemed entirely unconcerned about the impression he
made on her. His eyes, his sick, filmed eyes, looked at her with no
shrinking, with no bravado, with an entire indifference which gave,
through all the desolation of his appearance, the strangest, careless
dignity to the man. He did not care what she thought of him. He did
not care what any one thought of him. He gave the impression of a man
whose accounts are all reckoned and the balance struck, long ago.

"So this is Sylvia," he said, with the slightest appearance of
interest, glancing at her casually. "I always said you would make a
beautiful woman. But since I knew Victoria, I've seen that you must be
quite what she was at your age." It might have been a voice speaking
from beyond the grave, so listless, so dragging was its rhythm. "How
do you happen to be in Paris?" he asked. "Are your parents still
alive?"

"Oh _yes_!" said Sylvia, half startled by the preposterousness of the
idea that they might not be. "They're very well too. I had such a good
letter