Yet she was sorry he had invaded her hiding-place.  She had not yet achieved peace, and much of the weary task would have to be done over after he was gone.

In the meantime she drifted with astounding ease into another existence.  For it was she, and not the confidential gentlemen, who showed Peter Paris:  not the careless, pleasure-loving Paris of the restaurants, but of the Cluny and the Carnavalet.  The Louvre even was not neglected, and as they entered it first she recalled with still unaccustomed laughter his reply to the proffered services of the guide.  Indeed, there was much laughter in their excursions:  his native humour sprang from the same well that held his seriousness.  She was amazed at his ability to strip a sham and leave it grotesquely naked; shams the risible aspect of which she had never observed in spite of the familiarity four years had given her.  Some of his own countrymen and countrywomen afforded him the greatest amusement in their efforts to carry off acquired European “personalities,” combinations of assumed indifference and effrontery, and an accent the like of which was never heard before.  But he was neither bitter nor crude in his criticisms.  He made her laugh, but he never made her ashamed.  His chief faculty seemed to be to give her the power to behold, with astonishing clearness, objects and truths which had lain before her eyes, and yet hidden.  And she had not thought to acquire any more truths.

The depth of his pleasure in the things he saw was likewise a revelation to her.  She was by no means a bad guide to the Louvre and the Luxembourg, but the light in her which had come slowly flooded him with radiance at the sight of a statue or a picture.  He would stop with an exclamation and stand gazing, self-forgetful, for incredible periods, and she would watch him, filled with a curious sense of the limitations of an appreciation she had thought complete.  Where during his busy life had he got this thing which others had sought in many voyages in vain?

Other excursions they made, and sometimes these absorbed a day.  It was a wonderful month, that Parisian September, which Honora, when she allowed herself to think, felt that she had no right to.  A month filled to the brim with colour:  the stone facades of the houses, which in certain lights were what the French so aptly call bleuatre; the dense green foliage of the horse-chestnut trees, the fantastic iron grills, the Arc de Triomphe in the centre of its circle at sunset, the wide shaded avenues radiating from it, the bewildering Champs Elysees, the blue waters of the Seine and the graceful bridges spanning it, Notre Dame against the sky.  Their walks took them, too, into quainter, forgotten regions where history was grim and half-effaced, and they speculated on the France of other days.

They went farther afield; and it was given them to walk together down green vistas cut for kings, to linger on terraces with the river far below them, and the roofs of Paris in the hazy distance; that Paris, sullen so long, the mutterings of which the kings who had sat there must have heard with dread; that Paris which had finally risen in its wrath and taken the pleasure-houses and the parks for itself.