At last Mrs. Falchion said: “Justine, on Monday we will leave here.”
The girl was surprised, but she replied without comment: “Yes, madame; where do we go?”
There was a pause; then: “I do not know. I want to go where I shall get rested. A village in Italy or--” she paused.
Mrs. Falchion made a gesture of helplessness. “Yes, France will do.... The way around the world is long, and I am tired.” Minutes passed, and then she slowly said: “Justine, we will go to-morrow night.”
“Yes, madame, to-morrow night--and not next Monday.”
There was a strange only half-veiled melancholy in Mrs. Falchion’s next words: “Do you think, Justine, that I could be happy anywhere?”
Mrs. Falchion rose to a sitting posture, and looked at the girl fixedly, almost fiercely. A crisis was at hand. The pity, gentleness, and honest solicitude of Justine’s face conquered her, and her look changed to one of understanding and longing for companionship: sorrow swiftly welded their friendship.
Before Mrs. Falchion slept that night, she said again: “We will leave here to-morrow, Justine, for ever.”
And Justine replied: “Yes, madame, for ever.”
The next morning Roscoe was quiet and calm, but he looked ten years older than when I had first seen him. After breakfast he said to me: “I have to go to the valley to pay Phil Boldrick’s friend the money, and to see Mr. Devlin. I shall be back, perhaps, by lunchtime. Will you go with me, or stay here?”
“I shall try to get some fishing this morning, I fancy,” I said. “And possibly I shall idle a good deal, for my time with you here is shortening, and I want to have a great store of laziness behind me for memory, when I’ve got my nose to the grindstone.”
He turned to the door, and said: “Marmion, I wish you weren’t going. I wish that we might be comrades under the same roof till--” He paused and smiled strangely.
“Till the finish,” I added, “when we should amble grey-headed, sans everything, out of the mad old world? I imagine Miss Belle Treherne would scarcely fancy that.... Still, we can be friends just the same. Our wives won’t object to an occasional bout of loafing together, will they?”
I was determined not to take him too seriously. He said nothing, and in a moment he was gone.