Denton.  The blackbird seemed never to have heard of war.  He sang as if the whole world were a garden of languor and love.  Joan looked at her watch.  The first gong would sound in a few minutes.  She pictured the dreary, silent dining-room with its few scattered occupants, and her heart sank at the prospect.  To her relief came remembrance of a cheerful but entirely respectable restaurant near to the Louvre to which she had been taken a few nights before.  She had noticed quite a number of women dining there alone.  She closed her dispatch case with a snap and gave a glance at herself in the great mirror.  The blackbird was still singing.

She walked up the Rue des Sts.  Peres, enjoying the delicious air.  Half way across the bridge she overtook a man, strolling listlessly in front of her.  There was something familiar about him.  He was wearing a grey suit and had his hands in his pockets.  Suddenly the truth flashed upon her.  She stopped.  If he strolled on, she would be able to slip back.  Instead of which he abruptly turned to look down at a passing steamer, and they were face to face.

It made her mad, the look of delight that came into his eyes.  She could have boxed his ears.  Hadn’t he anything else to do but hang about the streets.

He explained that he had been listening to the band in the gardens, returning by the Quai d’Orsay.

“Do let me come with you,” he said.  “I kept myself free this evening, hoping.  And I’m feeling so lonesome.”

Poor fellow!  She had come to understand that feeling.  After all, it wasn’t altogether his fault that they had met.  And she had been so cross to him!

He was reading every expression on her face.

“It’s such a lovely evening,” he said.  “Couldn’t we go somewhere and dine under a tree?”

It would be rather pleasant.  There was a little place at Meudon, she remembered.  The plane trees would just be in full leaf.

A passing cab had drawn up close to them.  The chauffeur was lighting his pipe.

Even Mrs. Grundy herself couldn’t object to a journalist dining with a politician!

The stars came out before they had ended dinner.  She had made him talk about himself.  It was marvellous what he had accomplished with his opportunities.  Ten hours a day in the mines had earned for him his living, and the night had given him his leisure.  An attic, lighted by a tallow candle, with a shelf of books that left him hardly enough for bread, had been his Alma Mater.  History was his chief study.  There was hardly an authority Joan could think of with which he was not familiar. Julius Caesar was his favourite play.  He seemed to know it by heart.  At twenty-three he had been elected a delegate, and had entered Parliament at twenty-eight.  It had been a life of hardship, of privation, of constant strain; but she found herself unable to pity him.  It was a tale of strength, of struggle, of victory, that he told her.