any better than he liked hers to May! As on certain other occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual composure, she betrayed no sign of surprise: and at once he concluded: “He writes to her, then.”
“ M. Rivière went to see you?”
“Yes: didn’t you know?”
“No,” she answered simply.
“And you’re not surprised?”
She hesitated. “Why should I be? He told me in Boston that he knew you; that he’d met you in England I think.”
“Ellen—I must ask you one thing.”
“Yes.”
“I wanted to ask it after I saw him, but I couldn’t put it in a letter. It was Rivière who helped you to get away—when you left your husband?”
His heart was beating suffocatingly. Would she meet this question with the same composure?
“Yes: I owe him a great debt,” she answered, without the least tremor in her quiet voice.
Her tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that Archer’s turmoil subsided. Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds.
“I think you’re the most honest woman I ever met!” he exclaimed.