They had talked about everything except themselves. Perhaps
her reticence had been caused by his.
They came, at length, upon the levee, and sat upon a great, prostrate
beam. The air was pungent with the dust of commerce. The great river
slipped yellowly past. Across it Algiers lay, a longitudinous black
bulk against a vibrant electric haze sprinkled with exact stars.
The girl was young and of the piquant order. A certain bright
melancholy pervaded her; she possessed an untarnished, pale prettiness
doomed to please. Her voice, when she spoke, dwarfed her theme. It
was the voice capable of investing little subjects with a large
interest. She sat at ease, bestowing her skirts with the little
womanly touch, serene as if the begrimed pier were a summer garden.
Lorison poked the rotting boards with his cane.
He began by telling her that he was in love with some one to whom he
durst not speak of it. "And why not?" she asked, accepting swiftly
his fatuous presentation of a third person of straw. "My place in the
world," he answered, "is none to ask a woman to share. I am an
outcast from honest people; I am wrongly accused of one crime, and am,
I believe, guilty of another."
Thence he plunged into the story of his abdication from society.
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