you. I'm ready too; I will wait for you in the dining-room. Come down as soon as you are dressed."
"All right!" the young man answered.
He wasted no time over his toilette, the more so because it was none too warm in his room, for at this early hour it was still quite dark; and then taking his light in one hand he opened his door carefully so as to make no noise, tip-toed along the landing, and went down the staircase to join Thérèse in the dining-room. The girl was an accomplished housekeeper already, and while waiting for the young fellow she had got a scratch meal together.
"Let us have breakfast quickly," she suggested; "it isn't snowing this morning, and if you like we might walk to the station. We have plenty of time, and it will do us good to have a walk."
"It will warm us up anyhow," Charles Rambert replied; he was only half-awake, but he sat beside Thérèse, and did justice to the preparations she had made.
"Do you know that it is very wonderful of you to get up so punctually?" Mme. de Langrune's granddaughter remarked. "How did you manage it? Last night you were afraid you would sleep on as usual."
"It was not much trouble for me to wake up," Charles Rambert answered. "I hardly closed an eye all night."
"But I promised to come and knock at your door myself, so you might have slept without any anxiety."
"That's so, but to tell you the truth, Thérèse, I was regularly upset and excited by the thought of papa arriving this morning."
They had both finished breakfast, and Thérèse got up.
"Shall we start?" she asked.
"Yes."
Thérèse opened the hall door, and the two young people went down the flight of steps leading to the garden. The girl had thrown a big cloak over her shoulders, and she inhaled the pure morning air with keen delight.
"I love going out in the early morning," she declared.
"Well, I don't like it at all," Charles Rambert confessed with characteristic candour. "Good Lord, how cold it is! And it is still pitch dark!"
"Surely you are not going to be frightened?" said Thérèse teasingly.
Charles Rambert made an irritable movement of vexation and surprise.
"Frightened? What do you take me for, Thérèse? If I don't like going out in the early morning it's really only because it is cold."
She laughed at him while they were crossing the lawn towards the out-buildings, through which she meant to get out on to the high road. As they passed the stables they came across a groom who was leisurely getting an old brougham out of the coach-house.
"Don't hurry, Jean," Thérèse called out as she greeted him. "We are going to walk to the station, and the only important thing is that you should be there to bring us back."
The man touched his cap and the two young people passed through the park gate and found themselves upon the high road.
It was still very dark, with just a wan reflection in the distance of the sky vaguely outlining some cloud-shapes to the eastward to give some promise of the day. There was no sound to break the silence of the fields, and as they walked briskly along Charles and Thérèse could hear their footsteps ringing on the hard surface of the frozen ground.
"It must please you awfully to be going to meet your father," said Mme. de Langrune's granddaughter half questioningly. "It is a long time since you have seen him, isn't it?"
"Three years," Charles Rambert answered, "and then just for a few minutes. He is coming home from America now, and before that he travelled in Spain for a long time."
"He was travelling the whole time you were a child, wasn't he?"
"Yes, always: either in Colombia, looking after his rubber plantations there, or in Spain, where he has a good deal of property too. When he was in Paris he used to come to the school and ask for me, and I saw him in the parlour—for a quarter of an hour."
"And your mother?"
"Oh, mamma was different. You know, Thérèse, I spent all the childhood that I can remember at the school. I liked the masters and had good chums, and was very happy there, and if the truth must be told I looked forward with anything but pleasure to the holidays, when I had to go to my parents' house. I always felt a stranger with them; my real home was the school-room, where I had my desk and all my own interests. And then, you know, when one is little one doesn't understand things much; I didn't feel having hardly any family, very much."
"But you loved your mother very much?"
Thérèse asked the question quite anxiously, and it was patent that she would have thought it dreadful if her companion had not had a real affection for his mother.
"Oh, yes, I loved her," Charles Rambert answered; "but I hardly knew her either." And as Thérèse showed her surprise he went on, telling her something of the secret of his lonely childhood. "You see, Thérèse, now that I am a man I guess lots of things that I could not have had even a suspicion of then. My father and mother did not get on well together. They were what you call an ill-assorted couple. They were both very good, but their characters did not harmonise. When I was little I always saw mamma silent and sad, and papa active and on the go, and bright and talking at the top of his voice. I half believe he frightened mamma! And then my father was constantly away, whereas mamma hardly ever went out. When a servant took me to the house on Thursdays, I was taken up to say good morning to her, and I invariably found her lying on a sofa in her room, with the blinds down and almost dark. She just touched me with her lips and asked me one or two questions, and then I was taken away again because I tired her."
"Was she ill, then?"
"Mamma always has been ill. I suppose you know, Thérèse, that three months ago—stay, it was just when I had taken my degree and went to Germany—she was sent to an asylum? I believe my father had wanted her to agree to undergo careful treatment of the kind long before, but she would not."
Thérèse was silent for a few minutes.
"You have not been very happy," she said presently.
"Oh, it was only after I grew up that I felt unhappy. When I was a little chap I never thought of how sad it is to have no real father or mother. The last four or five years it has hurt me, but when he came to see me once at school, papa told me he would take me with him as soon as I had taken my degree and grown up. Last October, after my examination, he wrote and told me to be patient a little longer, and that he was hurrying on with the winding up of his business and coming back to France. That gave me a hope which has brightened these last few months, and will also make you understand why I am so pleased this morning at my fathers coming. It seems to me that a new life is going to begin."
Day was breaking now: a dirty December day, with the light filtering through heavy grey clouds that drifted along the ground, hid the horizon, clung to the low hills, and then suddenly dispersed in long wisps driven by a keen breeze, that got up in gusts, and drove clouds of dust along the hard frozen ground.
"I have not been very happy either," said Thérèse, "for I lost my father when I was tiny: I don't even remember him; and mamma must be dead as well."
The
