Her face altered instantly, exchanging its retrospective light for
the look of slightly shadowed watchfulness which he had known as
most habitual to it.
"It was impossible--it has always been so. My husband would not go;
and since--since our separation--there have been family reasons."
Durham sighed impatiently. "Why do you talk of reasons? The truth
is, you have made your life here. You could never give all this up!"
He made a discouraged gesture in the direction of the Place de la
Concorde.
"Give it up! I would go tomorrow! But it could never, now, be for
more than a visit. I must live in France on account of my boy."
Durham's heart gave a quick beat. At last the talk had neared the
point toward which his whole mind was straining, and he began to
feel a personal application in her words. But that made him all the
more cautious about choosing his own.
"It is an agreement--about the boy?" he ventured.
"I gave my word. They knew that was enough," she said proudly;
adding, as if to put him in full possession of her reasons: "It
would have been much more difficult for me to obtain complete
control of my son if it had not been understood that I was to live
in France."
"That seems fair," Durham assented after a moment's reflection: it
was his instinct, even in the heat of personal endeavour, to pause a
moment on the question of "fairness." The personal claim reasserted
itself as he added tentatively: "But when he _is_ brought up--when
he's grown up: then you would feel freer?"
She received this with a start, as a possibility too remote to have
entered into her view of the future. "He is only eight years old!"
she objected.
"Ah, of course it would be a long way off?"
"A long way off, thank heaven! French mothers part late with their
sons, and in that one respect I mean to be a French mother."
"Of course--naturally--since he has only you," Durham again
assented.
He was eager to show how fully he took her point of view, if only to
dispose her to the reciprocal fairness of taking his when the time
came to present it. And he began to think that the time had now
come; that their walk would not have thus resolved itself, without
excuse or pretext, into a tranquil session beneath the trees, for
any purpose less important than that of giving him his opportunity.
He took it, characteristically, without seeking a transition. "When
I spoke to you, the other day, about myself--about what I felt for
you--I said nothing of the future, because, for the moment, my mind
refused to travel beyond its immediate hope of happiness. But I
felt, of course, even then, that the hope involved various
difficulties--that we can't, as we might once have done, come
together without any thought but for ourselves; and whatever your
answer is to be, I want to tell you now that I am ready to accept my
share of the difficulties." He paused, and then added explicitly:
"If there's the least chance of your listening to me, I'm willing to
live over here as long as you can keep your boy with you."