That was just it.  She had gone straight to the heart of his mystery:  his strangeness was the strange pathos that invested him; the “singularity” of “that other monsieur” was solved for me at last.

When she had spoken she rose, advanced a step, and stood looking out over the valley again, her skirts pressing the balustrade.  One of the moments in my life when I have wished to be a figure painter came then, as she raised her arms, the sleeves, of some filmy texture, falling back from them with the gesture, and clasped her hands lightly behind her neck, the graceful angle of her chin uplifted to the full rain of moonshine.  Little Miss Elliott, in the glamour of these same blue showerings, had borrowed gauzy weavings of the fay and the sprite, but Mrs. Harman—­tall, straight, delicate to fragility, yet not to thinness—­ was transfigured with a deeper meaning, wearing the sadder, richer colours of the tragedy that her cruel young romance had put upon her.  She might have posed as she stood against the marble railing—­and especially in that gesture of lifting her arms—­for a bearer of the gift at some foredestined luckless ceremony of votive offerings.  So it seemed, at least, to the eyes of a moon-dazed old painter-man.

She stood in profile to me; there were some jasmine flowers at her breast; I could see them rise and fall with more than deep breathing; and I wondered what the man who had talked of her so wildly, only yesterday, would feel if he could know that already the thought of him had moved her.

“I haven’t had my life.  It’s gone!” It was almost as if I heard his voice, close at hand, with all the passion of regret and protest that rang in the words when they broke from him in the forest.  And by some miraculous conjecture, within the moment I seemed not only to hear his voice but actually to see him, a figure dressed in white, far below us and small with the distance, standing out in the moonlight in the middle of the tree-bordered avenue leading to the chateau gates.

I rose and leaned over the railing.  There was no doubt about the reality of the figure in white, though it was too far away to be identified with certainty; and as I rubbed my eyes for clearer sight, it turned and disappeared into the shadows of the orderly grove where I had stood, one day, to watch Louise Harman ascend the slopes of Quesnay.  But I told myself, sensibly, that more than one man on the coast of Normandy might be wearing white flannels that evening, and, turning to my companion, found that she had moved some steps away from me and was gazing eastward to the sea.  I concluded that she had not seen the figure.

“I have a request to make of you,” she said, as I turned.  “Will you do it for me—­setting it down just as a whim, if you like, and letting it go at that?”

“Yes, I will,” I answered promptly.  “I’ll do anything you ask.”

She stepped closer, looked at me intently for a second, bit her lip in indecision, then said, all in a breath: