"Fine weather for walking," Monsieur Daunay replied, looking away from the young woman up at the vivid spring sky and round at the expansive day, all wind, sunlight, and sauntering groups of people.
"You often walk here?" he continued pleasantly.
"Not so often; I am too hard worked to get a frequent holiday: but Mr. Damier takes us out sometimes."
"Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us."
"Very well. We shall see you at tea to-morrow?" Claire laid a gently urgent hand upon his arm. "I have been practising the Gluck. I think you will be pleased with it. You will come?"
"With great pleasure, as always," said the Frenchman, but still with something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.
They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.
Monsieur Daunay might or might not be shocked, but Damier felt that he himself was, more so than he could quite account for. He fixed upon that wholly unnecessary half-untruth of hers; he could not let it pass.
"We have often come here; your mother has only once come with us," he said, with the effect of cold shyness that his displeasure usually took; it always required an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier's part to express displeasure.
"There was no necessity for him to know that," she returned, adding, with a laugh: "Now I have shocked both of you--he in his _convenances_, you in your English veracity. I don't mind fibbing in the least, I must tell you."
"Don't you?" His displeasure was now determined to show its definite coolness.
"Not in the least," said Claire, with perfect good humor, "in myself or in others"; and she added, with a little laugh at herself, "unless other people's fibs interfere with mine; but I think that I mind their fibs interfering less than their truths."
Damier resigned himself to feeling that, after all, he was thoroughly prepared for any such developments in Claire; it was the tragedy in the thought of the other Clara that was knocking at his heart.
THE arrival in Paris, where she was to pass some months, of a friend of Damier's, Lady Surfex, a charming, capable woman whose husband was his nearest friend, was the means of casting a further and still more lurid light upon Claire's character and Madame Vicaud's past.