Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/188

 can't, are you too proud to please an old friend?"

He took her hand again and kissed it. "Vous êtes tout à fait grande dame, mademoiselle," he said simply. "Vous me sauvez la vie. I will go."

After that the days were hours to her, the hours minutes. She tasted the full sweet of her renunciation, she rode on the top wave of the strange, excited joy that urged her on to the minutest preparations for his comfort. He moved in a waking dream, a confused tremble of happiness; he could not know her alternations of fierce regret and quiet resignation, he did not see how the hand shook that filled his plate, nor how the eyes that smiled so kindly and serenely into his were red with crying. Le bon Dieu had laid in his lap the blessing he was hungering and thirsting after, and he took it with the happy blindness of a starving child.