"I think you will be comfortable here, mademoiselle."
Sara Lee, who still clutched her small bag of gold, shook her head.
"Comfortable, yes," she said. "But I am afraid it is very expensive."
Henri named an extremely low figure--an exact fourth, to be accurate,
of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and
his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the
Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to her
almost fiercely: "You are to understand, madame, that this lady has been placed in my
care by authority that will not be questioned. She is to have every
deference."
That was all, but was enough. And from that time on Sara Lee Kennedy,
of Ohio, was called, in the tiny box downstairs which constituted the
office, "Mademoiselle La Princesse."
Henri did a characteristic and kindly thing for Sara Lee before he left
that evening on one of the many mysterious journeys that he was to make
during the time Sara Lee knew him. He came to her door, menus in hand,
and painstakingly ordered for her a dinner for that night, and the
three meals for the day following.
He made no suggestion of dining with her that evening. Indeed, watching
him from her small table, Sara Lee decided that he had put her entirely
out of his mind. He did not so much as glance at her. Save the cashier
at her boxed-in desk and money drawer, she was the only woman in that
room full of officers. Quite certainly Henri was the only man who did
not find some excuse for glancing in her direction.
But finishing early, he paused by the cashier's desk to pay for his meal,
and then he gave Sara Lee the stiffest and most ceremonious of bows.
She felt hurt. Alone in her great room, the curtains drawn by order of
the police, lest a ray of light betray the town to eyes in the air, she
went carefully over the hours she had spent with Henri that day,
looking for a cause of offense. She must have hurt him or he would
surely have stopped to speak to her.
Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame
when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and
she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such
phrases as: "Il y a une erreur dans la note," and "Garcon, quels fruits
avez-vous?"
She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last.
There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly
without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered
about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she
was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to
learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based
not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding.