, ignoring all other considerations, as though he
were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile
we were coming out through the porch; we were passing close beside him;
he was too well bred to turn his head away; but he fixed his eyes, which
had suddenly changed to those of a seer, lost in the profundity of his
vision, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us,
and so had not to acknowledge our presence. His face emerged, still with
an air of innocence, from his straight and pliant coat, which looked
as though conscious of having been led astray, in spite of itself,
and plunged into surroundings of a detested splendour. And a spotted
necktie, stirred by the breezes of the Square, continued to float in
front of Legrandin, like the standard of his proud isolation, of his
noble independence. Just as we reached the house my mother discovered
that we had forgotten the 'Saint-Honore,' and asked my father to go
back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the church we met
Legrandin, coming towards us with the same lady, whom he was escorting
to her carriage. He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was
saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little
sign, which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids, and as
it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to
pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the
intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which
they had to find expression, he made that blue chink, which was set
apart for us, sparkle with all the animation of cordiality, which went
far beyond mere playfulness, and almost touched the border-line of
roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink
of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the
mysteries of complicity in a plot, and finally exalted his assurances
of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a
declaration of love, lighting up for us, and for us alone, with a secret
and languid flame invisible by the great lady upon his other side, an
enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.

Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him
on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company,"
he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from
some land to which we shall never go again, come