Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/98

 order out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching and considering him as he played his dance—Edmund Pair playing a dance for prostitutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly changed. There were the same grey eyes, deep-set and wide apart, under the same broad forehead; the same fine nose and chin, the same sensitive mouth. The whole face was pretty much the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a look of apathy, of inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection of it. His hair had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no older than his years. His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained its vigour and its distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk jacket, and his beard was two days old, you could in no circumstances have taken him for anything but a gentleman. I waited anxiously for the time when we should be alone—anxiously, yet with a sort of terror. I was burning to understand, and yet I shrunk from doing so. If to conjecture even vaguely what experiences could have brought him to this, what dark things suffered or done, had been melancholy when he was a nameless old musician, now it was appalling, and I dreaded the explanation that I longed to hear.

At last he struck his final chord, and rose from the piano. Then he turned to me and said, composedly enough, "Well, I'm ready." He, apparently, had in some measure pulled himself together. In the street he took my arm. "Let's walk in this direction," he said, leading off, "towards the Christian quarter of the town." And in a moment he went on: "This has been an odd meeting. What brings you to Bordeaux?"

I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the night between two trains.

"Then it's all the more surprising that you should have stumbled into the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You've altered