I called him, and went on up toward the Arc.
"I couldn't have done otherwise," I thought. I knew I did not wish
to have done otherwise. I knew I should say again exactly the same
if the brougham were again before me, but yet--
"I want nothing now that I have my work on hand," I told myself, as
the arched foot went on before me up the pavement.
"By-and-by"--but then life seemed all by-and-bys for me.
I shortened my walk. Everything seemed to jar upon my nerves. I went
back to the hotel by a quiet way, and then up to the empty room to
work.
Howard did not return for a couple of days. On the third I was
sitting after dinner at one of the tables outside the hotel cafe,
smoking, under the line of trees that edge the Paris kerb, when a
fiacre drew up at my very elbow, and Howard got out. He did not see
me for a minute, engaged with paying the cocher and hunting for a
pourboire, and then he was just going straight across the lighted
trottoir into the hotel when I called to him.
"Hullo, Vic! there you are!" he said, turning back. "I didn't see
you under the tree."
He came back and drew up a chair, with a scraping sound, to the
opposite side of my table, leant his elbows upon it, and pushed his
hat back. There was a blaze of light, all across the pavement to
where we were sitting, from the windows and open glass doors of the
cafe.
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