"No--o--But I must get the car out before dark or there will be no excuse--" She pushed back her chair and went to the window. The sun was sinking over the mountains and the scenery in the western sky was reflected in the fiery pools between the cobbles in the street.
She paused and thought. "How do you come down to-morrow?"
"I don't. I go on to Brussels. There is a car at Revins belonging to my agent. He will take me to Dinant for the Brussels train."
"You are bound for Brussels? Yet you could have gone straight from Paris to Brussels?"
"Yet I didn't because I wanted to see you!"
She took down her cap and coat from the nail on which they were hanging.
"Need you go yet?" he said, withdrawing the clothes from her arm, and laying them upon a chair. She sat down again.
"The sun is sinking. The town gets dark so quickly here, though it's light enough in the mountains. If I leave it later the men will be gone home, and the garage key with them."
"You're right," he said. "Put them on," and he held the coat for her. "But once you have the car there's no hurry over our drive. Yes, fetch it quickly, and then we'll go up above Revins and I'll show you the things I have in mind."
He drew out a fat, red note-book and held it up.
"It's full of my thoughts," he said. "Quick with the car, and we'll get up there while it's light enough to show you!"
She slipped out under the apple-red sky, through the streets where the shadows of the houses lay black as lacquer.
Before the locked gates of the garage the _brigadier_ lounged smoking his little, dry cigarettes.
"We are on fire," he said, pointing up the street at the mountain. "What an evening!"
"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again! And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the key!"
"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come in hang the key on the nail in the office."
Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the Rue de Clèves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in which to fight with her disinclination.