She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot together over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she lived in—­a knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of yellow-backed fiction—­gave a thrilling significance to her naturalness.  Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes.  If, in the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the Park, the idea would have presented itself to her companion as agreeable but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive’s suggestion that they should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with unspecified possibilities.

He was so throbbing with the sense of these possibilities that he walked beside her without speaking down the length of the wide alley which follows the line of the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even, when they reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the steps to the terrace of the Feuillants.  For, after all, the possibilities were double-faced, and her bold departure from custom might simply mean that what she had to say was so dreadful that it needed all the tenderest mitigation of circumstance.

There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence:  it was a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to manage pauses with ease.  In her Frisbee days she might have packed this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet.  The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace, touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her.  And there was such fear in the thought—­he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset glories of the Arch—­that all he had meant to say when he finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated:  “Well?”

She answered at once—­as though she had only awaited the call of the national interrogation—­“I don’t know when I have been so happy.”

“So happy?” The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair skin.

“As I was just now—­taking tea with your mother and sisters.”

Durham’s “Oh!” of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment, which she met only by the reconciling murmur:  “Shall we sit down?”

He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot, and placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying reluctantly, as he did so:  “Of course it was an immense pleasure to them to see you again.”