king
it tremble with his steps--a jaunty cavalry officer, with a trim
moustache and bright dancing eyes. He walked past them, but threw a
searching look at Louise, and, a little further along the bridge, stood
still, as if to watch something that was floating in the water, in
reality to look covertly back at her. She had taken no notice of him as
he passed, but when he paused, she raised her head; and then she looked
at him--with a preoccupied air, it was true, but none the less
steadily, and for several seconds on end. The words died on Maurice's
lips: and going home, he was as irresponsive as she herself ...

"I love you, Louise--love you." He said it now, sitting back in his
dark corner in the theatre; but amid the buzz and hum of the music, and
the shouting of the toreadors, he might have called the words aloud,
and still she would not have heard them.

Strangely enough, however, at this moment, for the first time during
the evening, she turned her head. His eyes were fixed on her, in a
dark, exorbitant gaze. Her own face hardened.

"The opera-glass!"

Maurice opened the leather case, and gave her the glass. Their fingers
met, and hers groped for a moment round his hand. He withdrew it as
though her touch had burnt him. Louise flashed a glance at him, and
laid the opera-glass en the ledge in front of her, without making use
of it.

Slowly the traitorous blood subsided. To the reverberating music, which
held all ears, and left him sitting alone with his fate, Maurice had a
moment of preternatural clearness. He realised that only one course was
open to him, and that was to go away. BEI NACHT UND NEBEL, if it could
not be managed otherwise, but, however it happened, he must go. More
wholly for her sake than Madeleine had dreamed of: unless he wanted to
be led into some preposterous folly that would embitter the rest of his
life. Who could say how long the wall he had built up round her--of the
knowledge he shared with her, of pity for what she had undergone--would
stand against the onset of this morbid, overmastering desire?

To the gay, feelingless music, he thought out his departure in detail,
sparing himself nothing.

But in the long interval after the second act, when they were
downstairs on the LOGGIA, where it was still half daylight; where the
lights of cafes and street-lamps were only beginning here and there to
dart into existence; where every man they met seemed to notice Louise
with a start of atten