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fastening my dress, and I certainly felt his hand . . . Well, at any rate, don’t trust him.”
Maurice dreamily lit a cigarette. They spoke of the six days’ bicycle race at the winter velodrome, and of the aviation show at the motor exhibition at Brussels, without experiencing the slightest amusement. Then they tried love-making as a sort of convenient pastime, and succeeded in becoming moderately absorbed in it; but at the very moment when she might have been expected to play a part more in accordance with a mutual sentiment, she exclaimed with a sudden start:
“Good Heavens! Maurice, how stupid of you to tell me that my guardian angel can see me. You cannot imagine how uncomfortable the idea makes me.”
Maurice, somewhat taken aback, recalled, a little roughly, his mistress’s wandering thoughts.
She declared that her principles forbade her to think of playing a round game with angels.
Maurice was longing to see Arcade again and had no other thought. He reproached himself for suffering him to depart without discovering where he was going, and he cudgelled his brains night and day thinking how to find him again.
On the bare chance, he put a notice in the personal column of one of the big papers, running thus:
“Arcade. Come back to your Maurice.”
Day after day went by, and Arcade did not return.
