"Then the snow will lie even deeper, and there will be no work."

"Get her back quickly, Alfred, or the snow will lie too deep for you.

I will send you a note, f.a.n.n.y."

"That is quite easy, is it?"

"Easy. But compromising."

"Oh, surely--not very?"

"In France everything is compromising, mademoiselle," said Alfred. "But he will find a way to send it."

Julien had urged her to hurry, fearing the snow; now he said, "You are going?" as though it distressed him.

"I must."

"Yes, you must, you must. Where is your leather coat? Here--"

He found it.

"Stay! I must read this before you go. It is my demobilisation paper with the final date. I will look--"

"Are you coming?" called Alfred, from the end of the pa.s.sage. "It is snowing wildly."

"There is some mistake," muttered Julien, his eye searching the large unfolded doc.u.ment.

"When, when--?" f.a.n.n.y, hanging on his words, watched him.

"One moment. It is a mistake. Alfred! Alfred, here, a minute!"

"Look," he said, when Alfred had re-entered the room. He handed the paper to him, and drew him under the light. "See, they say--ah, wait, did I register at Charleville or Paris?"

"At Charleville. As an agriculturist. I remember well."

"Then there is no mistake." He folded up the paper, pinching the edges of the folds slowly with his thumb and finger nail.

"f.a.n.n.y, it has come sooner than I expected."

She could say nothing, but fastened her gaze upon his lips.

"Much, much sooner, and there is no evading it. Alfred, I will bring her in a minute."

"The snow is coming down," muttered the mahogany G.o.d, grown wooden again under the light, and retreated.

"It is worse for me; it has been done by my own stupidity. But in those days I didn't know you--"

"Oh, if you are thinking of breaking it to me--only tell me _which_ day!

To-morrow?" She moved up close to him.

"Not to-morrow! No, no," he said, almost relieved that it was better than she feared. "In five days, in five days. Oh, this brings it before me! I have no wish now for that release for which I have longed. f.a.n.n.y, it is only a change, not a parting!"

Alfred's voice called sharply from without. "You must come, mademoiselle!

Julien, bring her!"

"One instant. She is coming. f.a.n.n.y, I must think it out. Until I go--I shall have time--we will get you sent to Charleville, and Charleville I must come often to see my land and my factory."

"How often?"

"Often, I must--"

"How often?"

"Once a week at last. Perhaps more often. If we can only manage that!"

"Julien!" Alfred returned and stood again in the doorway. "This is absurd. I can never get to the river if you keep her."

"Go, go. I will arrange! You will have a note from me to-morrow. Hurry, good-night, good-night!"

She was in the car; now the door was shutting on her; yet once more he pulled it open, "Ah! Oh, good-night!"

At the side of the car, the snow whirling round his head, Julien kissed her face in the darkness; Alfred, relentless, drove the car onward, and the door shutting with a slam, left him standing by the inn.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RIVER

The indifferent Alfred drove his unhappy burden towards the river.

Walled in by the rush of snowflakes about him he made what way he could, but it was well-nigh impossible to see. The lamps gave no light, for the flakes had built a shutter across the gla.s.s like a policeman's dark lantern. The flying mult.i.tudes in the air turned him dizzy; he could not tell upon which side of the road he drove, and he could not tell what he would do when the wall beyond the outskirts of Chantilly forsook him. As to what was happening below him, what ruts, ditches, pits or hillocks he was navigating, he had no idea; his ship was afloat upon the snow, sluggishly rolling and heaving as it met with soft, mysterious obstacles.

Heaviness and gloom sat upon the velvet seat behind him. The white, wild night outside was playful and waggish compared with the black dejection behind the opaque gla.s.s windows.

f.a.n.n.y, who could not see her hand move in the darkness, saw clearly with other miserable and roving eyes the road that lay before her.

"Julien, good-bye. Don't forget me!" That she would say to him in a few days; that was the gate, the black portal which would lead her into the road. That she would say, with entreaty, yet no painful tones of hers would represent enough the entreaty of her heart that _neither would forget the other_. She thought of this.

Not in wilful unreason, or in disbelief of his promise, she looked at this parting as though it might be final. Without him she could see no charm ahead. And yet.... Tough, leathery heart--indestructible spinner she knew herself to be--no sooner should the dew fall from this enchanting fabric, the web itself be torn, than she would set to work upon the flimsiest of materials to weave another. And with such weaving comes forgetfulness. She thought of this.

Not four feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide, second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter storm which was attacking everything in the short plain between the forest and the town. It leapt upon him in an outbreak of hisses; cut him with hailstones, swept up false banks of snow before him till the illusion of a road led him astray. He turned too much to the right, hung on the lip of a buried ditch, turned back again and saved himself. He turned too much to the left, tilted, hung, was in danger--yet found the centre of the road again. Here, on this wild plain, the exposed night was whiter--blanched enough, foreign enough, fitful enough to puzzle the most resolved and native traveller.

He arrived at a cross-roads. Yet was it a cross-roads? When roads are filled in level with the plain around them, the plain itself wind-churned like a ploughed field, when banks are rompishly erected, or melt unstably before the blows of the storm, it is hard to choose the true road from the false. He chose a road which instantly he saw to be no road. Too late. He pitched, this time not to recover. "A river--a river-bed!" was his horrified thought. Down went the nose of the car before him, the steering-wheel hitting him in the chest. Down came f.a.n.n.y and all her black thoughts against the gla.s.s at his back. The car had not fallen very far; it had slid forward into a snow-lined d.y.k.e, and remained, resting on its radiator, its front wheels thrust into the steep walls of the bank, its back wheels in the air. Alfred climbed down from a seat which had lost its seating power; f.a.n.n.y opened the door and stepped from the black interior into the deep snow. The front lamps were extinguished and buried in the opposite bank, the little red light at the back shone upwards to heaven.

"Well--"

"Well!"