in order to greet them with a smile of complicity.  The reader of the daily paper was now exchanging views with a friend on a neighboring bench regarding the possibilities of war.  The garden had become a thoroughfare.  The modistes upon going out from their establishments, and the ladies returning from shopping, were crossing through the square in order to shorten their walk.  The little avenue was a popular short-cut.  All the pedestrians were casting curious glances at the elegant lady and her companion seated in the shadow of the shrubbery with the timid yet would-be natural look of those who desire to hide themselves, yet at the same time feign a casual air.

“How exasperating!” sighed Marguerite.  “They are going to find us out!”

A girl looked at her so searchingly that she thought she recognized in her an employee of a celebrated modiste.  Besides, some of her personal friends who had met her in the crowded shops but an hour ago might be returning home by way of the garden.

“Let us go,” she said rising hurriedly.  “If they should spy us here together, just think what they might say! . . . and just when they are becoming a little forgetful!”

Desnoyers protested crossly.  Go away? . . .  Paris had become a shrunken place for them nowadays because Marguerite refused to go to a single place where there was a possibility of their being surprised.  In another square, in a restaurant, wherever they might go—­they would run the same risk of being recognized.  She would only consider meetings in public places, and yet at the same time, dreaded the curiosity of the people.  If Marguerite would like to go to his studio of such sweet memories! . . .

“To your home?  No! no indeed!” she replied emphatically “I cannot forget the last time I was there.”

But Julio insisted, foreseeing a break in that firm negative.  Where could they be more comfortable?  Besides, weren’t they going to marry as soon as possible? . . .

“I tell you no,” she repeated.  “Who knows but my husband may be watching me!  What a complication for my divorce if he should surprise us in your house!”

Now it was he who eulogized the husband, insisting that such watchfulness was incompatible with his character.  The engineer had accepted the facts, considering them irreparable and was now thinking only of reconstructing his life.

“No, it is better for us to separate,” she continued.  “Tomorrow we shall see each other again.  You will hunt a more favorable place.  Think it over, and you will find a solution for it all.”

But he wished an immediate solution.  They had abandoned their seats, going slowly toward the rue des Mathurins.  Julio was speaking with a trembling and persuasive eloquence.  To-morrow?  No, now.  They had only to call a taxicab.  It would be only a matter of a few minutes, and then the isolation, the mystery, the return to a sweet past—­to that intimacy in the studio where they had passed their happiest hours.  They would believe that no time had elapsed since their first meetings.