She looked at him for a long time, opened her lips but in the end only sighed lightly.
"And what do you know of her, you who have seen her so well as to be haunted by her face?" I asked.
I wouldn't have been surprised if she had answered me with another sigh.For she seemed only to be thinking of herself and looked not in my direction.But suddenly she roused up.
"Of her?" she repeated in a louder voice."Why should I talk of another woman? And then she is a great lady."At this I could not repress a smile which she detected at once.
"Isn't she? Well, no, perhaps she isn't; but you may be sure of one thing, that she is both flesh and shadow more than any one that I have seen.Keep that well in your mind: She is for no man! She would be vanishing out of their hands like water that cannot be held."I caught my breath."Inconstant," I whispered.
"I don't say that.Maybe too proud, too wilful, too full of pity.
Signorino, you don't know much about women.And you may learn something yet or you may not; but what you learn from her you will never forget.""Not to be held," I murmured; and she whom the quayside called Madame Leonore closed her outstretched hand before my face and opened it at once to show its emptiness in illustration of her expressed opinion.Dominic never moved.
I wished good-night to these two and left the cafe for the fresh air and the dark spaciousness of the quays augmented by all the width of the old Port where between the trails of light the shadows of heavy hulls appeared very black, merging their outlines in a great confusion.I left behind me the end of the Cannebiere, a wide vista of tall houses and much-lighted pavements losing itself in the distance with an extinction of both shapes and lights.Islunk past it with only a side glance and sought the dimness of quiet streets away from the centre of the usual night gaieties of the town.The dress I wore was just that of a sailor come ashore from some coaster, a thick blue woollen shirt or rather a sort of jumper with a knitted cap like a tam-o'-shanter worn very much on one side and with a red tuft of wool in the centre.This was even the reason why I had lingered so long in the cafe.I didn't want to be recognized in the streets in that costume and still less to be seen entering the house in the street of the Consuls.At that hour when the performances were over and all the sensible citizens in their beds I didn't hesitate to cross the Place of the Opera.
It was dark, the audience had already dispersed.The rare passers-by I met hurrying on their last affairs of the day paid no attention to me at all.The street of the Consuls I expected to find empty, as usual at that time of the night.But as I turned a corner into it I overtook three people who must have belonged to the locality.To me, somehow, they appeared strange.Two girls in dark cloaks walked ahead of a tall man in a top hat.I slowed down, not wishing to pass them by, the more so that the door of the house was only a few yards distant.But to my intense surprise those people stopped at it and the man in the top hat, producing a latchkey, let his two companions through, followed them, and with a heavy slam cut himself off from my astonished self and the rest of mankind.
In the stupid way people have I stood and meditated on the sight, before it occurred to me that this was the most useless thing to do.After waiting a little longer to let the others get away from the hall I entered in my turn.The small gas-jet seemed not to have been touched ever since that distant night when Mills and Itrod the black-and-white marble hall for the first time on the heels of Captain Blunt - who lived by his sword.And in the dimness and solitude which kept no more trace of the three strangers than if they had been the merest ghosts I seemed to hear the ghostly murmur, Americain, Catholique et gentilhomne.Amer..
." Unseen by human eye I ran up the flight of steps swiftly and on the first floor stepped into my sitting-room of which the door was open..."et gentilhomme." I tugged at the bell pull and somewhere down below a bell rang as unexpected for Therese as a call from a ghost.