asn't the happier for his absence, she was more at ease.
She could be at ease till the time came for moving on in one direction
or another, when she would be oppressed anew with the sense of her
helplessness. It became clearer to her that if she married at all it
would be to be taken care of.

The question was put formally before her at a moment when she was least
expecting it. It was an afternoon late in March when she was struggling
along the Boulevard du Midi, in the teeth of a warm west wind. On her
left children played in the sands or threw sticks or bruised flowers
into the huge breakers to see them rolled shoreward. On her right the
palms in the villa gardens bowed their heads eastward, while the mimosas
tossed their yellow branches wildly. Before her the Esterels formed a
jagged line of indigo flecked with red, above which masses of stormy
orange cloud broke along the edges into pink. It was still far from the
hour of sunset, though the glamour of sunset was gathering in the air.

She heard his step behind her scarcely an instant before he spoke.

"Oh, I say, Mrs. Walker, I want you to marry me."

The statement was so startling that in spite of all her preparatory
discussion with herself, she turned on him tragically. "For God's sake,
why?"

"Well, because I'm awfully fond of you, you know."

His expression touched her. There was no mistaking the kindliness in his
eyes, or the look of rather wan beseeching in his thin, pinched face. In
his golfing suit of Harris tweed he was not an unattractive figure, even
if he wasn't handsome.

Again her words had little relation to the things she had thought of
beforehand. Her heart was so much with him that she spoke with an
emotion she had never shown to him before.

"Even if you are, don't you see, dear friend, that you can't marry me?"

"Oh, but I can, you know."

She looked about her for a refuge where they could talk, finding it in a
rough shelter designed for the protection of nurses watching children
playing on the sands. It was empty for the moment, except for a tiny,
bare-legged girl of three or four crooning over a big doll. Edith led
the way. "Come over here." They sat down on a bench hacked with initials
and cleanly dirty with sand. The little girl at the other end of the
bench rolled her big eyes toward them with indifference, continuing to
croon to her doll:

"Dors, mon enfant; dors, dors; ta mere est allee au bal.... Dors, mon
enfant, dors; ta me