Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper roomof the quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest for seclusion to be based on sentimental motives, so soberly did Deering give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at his side.  She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure their hour together:  she was already learning that Deering shrank from sadness.  He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face their coming separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this completer nearness; but she waited, as always, for him to strike the opening note.

Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the hour.  Her heart was unversed inhappiness, but he had found the tone to lull her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any golden wonder.  Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something tacit and confirmed between them, as if his tenderness were a habit of the heart hardly needing the support of outward proof.

Such proof as he offered came, therefore, as a kind of crowning luxury, the flower of a profoundly rooted sentiment; andhere again the instinctive reserves and defenses would have seemed to vulgarize what his trust ennobled.  But if all the tender casuistries of her heart were at his service, he took no grave advantage of them.  Even when they sat alone after dinner, with the lights of the river trembling through their one low window, and the vast rumor of Paris inclosing them in a heart of silence, he seemed, as much as herself, under the spell of hallowing influences.  She felt it most of all as she yielded to the arm hepresently put about her, to the long caress he laid on her lips and eyes:  not a word or gesture missed the note of quiet union, or cast a doubt, in retrospect, on the pact they sealed with their last look.

That pact, as she reviewed it through a sleepless night, seemed to have consisted mainly, on his part, in pleadings for full and frequent news of her, on hers in the assurance that it shouldbe given as often as he asked it.  She had felt an intense desirenot to betray any undue eagerness, any crude desire to affirm anddefine her hold on him.  Her life had given her a certain acquaintance with the arts of defense:  girls in her situation were commonly supposed to know them all, and to use them as occasion called.  But Lizzie’s very need of them had intensified her disdain.  Just because she was so poor, and had always, materially, so to count her change and calculate her margin, she would at least know the joy of emotional prodigality, would give her heart as recklessly as the rich their millions.  She was sure now that Deering loved her, and if he had seized the occasion of their farewell to give her some definitely worded sign of his feeling—­if, more plainly, he had asked her to marry him,—­his doing so would have seemed less like a proof of his sincerity than of his suspecting in her the need of a verbal warrant.  That he had abstained seemed to show that he trusted her as she trusted him, and that they were one most of all in this deep security of understanding.