he felt that if she did so he would not be able to draw one significant line.
But, moving away, placing the two tall vases on the mantelpiece, she took her basket, passed a cloth over the table where the water had spilled, and went out, closing the door softly behind her.
Neither Graham nor Madame de Lamouderie spoke for some time after she had left them. Graham drew quickly, with bright, intent glances, and the old lady gazed with rapt docility at her painter. But as her breaths quieted, and her excitement dispersed itself in a general glow, her expression insensibly altered and he saw that his own old lady was returning to him, an old lady very different from Mademoiselle Ludérac's, or even Jill's; it was with him that she was her reallest self, and when her eyes met his it was as if there were a sense of complicity between them, a sense of entering a realm of experience from which such innocents were shut away.
'You look, as you sit there,' she told him, 'like a dear friend of my youth. A charming man; a finished homme du monde, but artist to his finger-tips. He had marvellous collections;—bronzes, gems, enamels; it was known throughout Europe. A splendid emerald I once possessed was his gift to me;—with my husband's sanction, bien entendu.'
Graham smiled but made no comment, and after a moment the old lady took up her tale. 'My husband and he had business enterprises together—alas, all unsuccessful; all ruinous. And he was my husband's
