I laughed.

“Charming age, yours,” said Mills, as we came out on the quays.  Already dim figures of the workers moved in the biting dawn and the masted forms of ships were coming out dimly, as far as the eye could reach down the old harbour.

“Well,” Mills began again, “you may oversleep yourself.”

This suggestion was made in a cheerful tone, just as we shook hands at the lower end of the Cannebiere.  He looked very burly as he walked away from me.  I went on towards my lodgings.  My head was very full of confused images, but I was really too tired to think.

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

Sometimes I wonder yet whether Mills wished me to oversleep myself or not:  that is, whether he really took sufficient interest to care.  His uniform kindliness of manner made it impossible for me to tell.  And I can hardly remember my own feelings.  Did I care?  The whole recollection of that time of my life has such a peculiar quality that the beginning and the end of it are merged in one sensation of profound emotion, continuous and overpowering, containing the extremes of exultation, full of careless joy and of an invincible sadness—­like a day-dream.  The sense of all this having been gone through as if in one great rush of imagination is all the stronger in the distance of time, because it had something of that quality even then:  of fate unprovoked, of events that didn’t cast any shadow before.

Not that those events were in the least extraordinary.  They were, in truth, commonplace.  What to my backward glance seems startling and a little awful is their punctualness and inevitability.  Mills was punctual.  Exactly at a quarter to twelve he appeared under the lofty portal of the Hotel de Louvre, with his fresh face, his ill-fitting grey suit, and enveloped in his own sympathetic atmosphere.

How could I have avoided him?  To this day I have a shadowy conviction of his inherent distinction of mind and heart, far beyond any man I have ever met since.  He was unavoidable:  and of course I never tried to avoid him.  The first sight on which his eyes fell was a victoria pulled up before the hotel door, in which I sat with no sentiment I can remember now but that of some slight shyness.  He got in without a moment’s hesitation, his friendly glance took me in from head to foot and (such was his peculiar gift) gave me a pleasurable sensation.

After we had gone a little way I couldn’t help saying to him with a bashful laugh:  “You know, it seems very extraordinary that I should be driving out with you like this.”

He turned to look at me and in his kind voice: 

“You will find everything extremely simple,” he said.  “So simple that you will be quite able to hold your own.  I suppose you know that the world is selfish, I mean the majority of the people in it, often unconsciously I must admit, and especially people with a mission, with a fixed idea, with some fantastic object in view, or even with only some fantastic illusion.  That doesn’t mean that they have no scruples.  And I don’t know that at this moment I myself am not one of them.”