’Helas! Morenita sighed.

I had blushed.  Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night.  But, indeed, the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude, that after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was more than I could bear with equanimity.  I was the proudest woman in the universe.  I scorned the lot of all other women.

The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. ’Au revoir!  Bon voyage!  Much success over there.’

The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.

Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita and one or two others accompanying us to the street.

And on the pavement a carpet had been laid.  The electric brougham was waiting.  I gathered up my skirt and sprang in.  Diaz followed, smiling at me.  He put his head out of the window and said a few words.  Morenita blew a kiss.  Villedo bowed profoundly.  The carriage moved in the direction of the boulevard....  I had carried him off.  Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham!  When, after the theatre, a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory in the fact that she is his?  Is it not the most delicious of avowals?  There is something in the enforced bend of one’s head as one steps in.  And when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap—­

I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations.  They must surely guess.

We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under the vast dome of mysterious blue.  And Paris, in her incomparable toilette of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living.  How soft was the air!  How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us half hidden in other carriages!  And in my heart was the lofty joy of work done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure.  My happiness was ardent and yet calm—­a happiness beyond my hopes, beyond what a mortal has the right to dream of.  Nothing could impair it, not even Diaz’ continued silence as to a marriage between us, not even the imminent brief separation that I was to endure.

‘My child,’ said Diaz suddenly, ’I’m very hungry.  I’ve never been so hungry.’

‘You surely didn’t forget to have your dinner?’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes, I did,’ he admitted like a child; ‘I’ve just remembered.’

‘Diaz!’ I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was intensified, ’you are really terrible!  What can I do with you?  You will eat before you leave me.  I must see to that.  We can get something for you at the hotel, perhaps.’

‘Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?’ he said.