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Laurence Vanderlyn, unpaid attaché at the American Embassy in Paris,strode down the long grey platform marked No. 5, of the Gare de Lyon. Itwas seven o'clock, the hour at which Paris is dining or is about todine, and the huge station was almost deserted.
The train de luxe had gone more than an hour ago, the Riviera rapidewould not start till ten, but one of those trains bound for the South,curiously named demi-rapides, was timed to leave in twenty minutes.
Foreigners, especially Englishmen and Americans, avoid these trains, andthis was why Laurence Vanderlyn had chosen it as the starting point ofwhat was to be a great adventure, an adventure which must for ever beconcealed, obliterated as much as may be from his own memory—do not menbabble in delirium?—once life had again become the rather grey thing hehad found it to be.
In the domain of the emotions it is the unexpected which generallyhappens, and now it was not only the unexpected but the incredible whichhad happened to this American diplomatist. He and Margaret Pargeter, theEnglishwoman whom he had loved with an absorbing, unsatisfied passion,and an ever-increasing concentration and selfless devotion, for sevenyears, were about to do that which each had sworn, together andseparately, should never come to pass,—that is, they were about tosnatch from Fate a few days of such free happiness and communion asduring their long years of intimacy they had never enjoyed. In order tosecure these fleeting moments of joy, she, the woman in the case, wasabout to run the greatest risk which can in these days be incurred bycivilised woman.
Margaret Pargeter was not free as Vanderlyn was free; she was awife,—not a happy wife, but one on whose reputation no shadow had everrested,—and further, she was the mother of a child, a son, whom sheloved with an anxious tenderness.... It was these two facts which madewhat she was going to do a matter of such moment not only to herself,but to the man to whom she was now about to commit her honour.
Striding up and down the platform to which he had bought early access byone of those large fees for which the travelling American of a certaintype is famed, Vanderlyn, with his long lean figure, and sternpre-occupied face, did not suggest, to the French eyes idly watchinghim, a lover,—still less the happy third in one of those conjugalcomedies which play so much greater a part in French literature and inFrench drama than they do in French life. He had thrust far back intohis heart the leaping knowledge of what was about to befall him, and hewas bending the whole strength