Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/203

Rh had remained ten minutes, to see if she would reappear, and then had marched out of the hotel), she received by the first post a letter from him, written the evening before. It conveyed his deep regret that their meeting in the morning should have been of so painful, so unnatural a character, and the hope that she did not consider, as her strange behaviour had seemed to suggest, that she had anything to complain of. There was too much he wanted to say and above all too much he wanted to ask, for him to consent to the indefinite postponement of a necessary interview. There were explanations, assurances, de part et d'autre, with which it was manifestly impossible that either of them should dispense. He would therefore propose that she should see him, and not be wanting in patience to that end, on the following evening. He did not propose an earlier moment because his hands were terribly full at home. Frankly speaking, the state of things there was of the worst. Jane and her husband had just arrived and had made him a violent, an unexpected scene. Two of the French newspapers had got hold of the article and had given the most perfidious extracts. His father had not stirred out of the house, had not put his foot inside of a club, for more than a week. Marguerite and Maxime were immediately to start for England, for an indefinite stay. They couldn't face their life in Paris. For himself, he was in the breach, fighting