She was wrapping him round with that unchanged
tenderness.
"It's--it's the old room!" he said.
But his enmity was dead. He was at peace with it. He had been
initiated. He had heard, very faintly it is true, but loud enough to
understand, the music to which the faun danced. He was not the
outsider any more.
"I wanted it to be the same."
"And the house----"
"I took it as soon as I could get it. I made up my mind to live here,
whatever it cost. You see, I was quite sure that you would go past one
of these days to have a look at it, and that you would say to yourself:
'Why, there's Francey, after all! I'll go in----'"
But they both drew back instinctively. He blundered into a hurried
question. The Gang? What had happened to them all? It seemed that
Gertie still lived, defying medical opinion and apparently feeding her
starved spirit on the treasures of the Vatican. Howard, who had become
a very bad artist and lived on selling copies of the masterpieces to
tourists, looked after her.
"But they're not married," Francey said. "Just friends."
He said humbly:
"Well, he's been awfully decent to her."
As to the rest, no one knew what had become of them.
"And you've done splendidly, Robert, better than any of us."
"I've been a failure," he answered, "a rotten failure!"
She accepted the statement gravely, without protest, and that sincerity
was like a skilled hand on a wound. It brought comfort where a
fumbling kindness would have been unendurable.
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