Page:Confidence (London, Macmillan & Co., 1921).djvu/186

 perhaps at this point exclaim with a pardonable consciousness of shrewdness, "Of course he went the next day to the Rue de Provence!" Of course, yes; only, as it happens, Bernard did nothing of the kind. He did one of the most singular things he had done in his life—a thing that puzzled him even at the time, and with regard to which he often afterwards wondered how the deuce he had managed it—he simply spent a fortnight at Blanquais-les-Galets. It was a very quiet fortnight; he spoke to no one, he formed no relations, he was company to himself. It may be added that he had never found himself company half so good. He struck himself as a reasonable, delicate fellow, who looked at things in such a way as to make him refrain—refrain successfully, that was the point—from concerning himself practically about Angela Vivian. His saying that he would find out the banker in the Rue de Provence had been for the benefit of the femme de chambre, whom he thought rather impertinent; he had really no intention whatever of entering that classic thoroughfare. He took long walks, rambled on the beach, along the base of the cliffs and among the brown sea-caves, and he thought a good deal of certain incidents that have figured at an earlier stage of this narrative. He had forbidden himself the future, as an object of contemplation, and it was therefore a matter of necessity that his imagination should take refuge among the warm and familiar episodes of the past. He wondered why Mrs. Vivian should have left the place so suddenly, and was, of course, struck with the analogy between this incident and her abrupt departure from Baden. It annoyed him, it troubled him, but it by no means rekindled the alarm he had felt on first perceiving the injured Angela on the beach. This alarm had been quenched by Angela's manner during the hour that followed 178