The Incomplete Amorist

Betty thought so too, when she had seen the "rooms exquisite on the first"--neat, bare, well-scrubbed rooms with red-tiled floors, scanty rugs and Frenchly varnished furniture--the garden room too, with big open hearth and no furniture but wicker chairs and tables.

"Mademoiselle can eat all alone on the terrace. The English mad shall not approach. I will charge myself with that. Mademoiselle may repose herself here as on the bosom of the mother of Mademoiselle."

Betty had her déjeuner on the little stone terrace with rickety rustic railings. Below lay the garden, thick with trees.

Away among the trees to the left an arbour. She saw through the leaves the milk-white gleam of flannels, heard the chink of china and cutlery. There, no doubt, the mad Englishman was even now breakfasting. There was the width of the garden between them. She sat still till the flannel gleam had gone away among the trees. Then she went out and explored the little town. She bought a blue packet of cigarettes. Miss Voscoe had often tried to persuade her to smoke. Most of the girls did. Betty had not wanted to do it any more for that. She had had a feeling that Vernon would not like her to smoke.

And in Paris one had to be careful. But now-"I am absolutely my own master," she said. "I am staying by myself at a hotel, exactly like a man. I shall feel more at home if I smoke. And besides, no one can see me. It's just for me. And it shows I don't care what he likes."

Lying in a long chair reading one of her Tauchnitz books and smoking, Betty felt very manly indeed.

The long afternoon wore on. The trees of the garden crowded round Betty with soft whispers in a language not known of the trees on the boulevards.

"I am very very unhappy," said Betty with a deep sigh of delight.

She went in, unpacked, arranged everything neatly. She always arranged everything neatly, but nothing ever would stay arranged. She wrote to her father, explaining that Madame Gautier had brought her and the other girls to Grez for the summer, and she gave as her address: Chez Madame Chevillon, Pavilion du Jardin, Grez.

"I shall be very very unhappy to-morrow," said Betty that night, laying her face against the coarse cool linen of her pillow; "to-day I have been stunned---I haven't been able to feel anything. But to-morrow."

To-morrow, she knew, would be golden and green even as to-day. But she should not care. She did not want to be happy. How could she be happy now that she had of her own free will put away the love of her life? She called and beckoned to all the thoughts that the green world shut out, and they came at her call, fluttering black wings to hide the sights and sounds of field and wood and green garden, and making their nest in her heart.